Daniel Horowitz spent seven years doing outreach-based link building before becoming Senior SEO Manager at Informatica. That arc — tactical links to enterprise strategy — is the spine of this episode of The Unscripted SEO Interview, and it comes with an unusually honest set of receipts: a Shopify project that underperformed, a family business erased by the Helpful Content Update, and an enterprise program that lost traffic and got better anyway.
The Shopify Exchange campaign that didn’t work
Asked for an outreach story that either succeeded or failed spectacularly, Daniel went straight to the one that surprised him. Agency-side, one of his big clients was Shopify, and the flagship project was Shopify Exchange — a marketplace for buying and selling stores and domains. They pitched directories and publications, including working the local angle (Houston domains for Houston businesses), and it landed far worse than the size of the brand should have allowed.
The lesson isn’t “outreach doesn’t work.” It’s that brand equity doesn’t transfer to a publisher who has no reason to care about your sub-product.
Why he stopped needing tactical links
Daniel still has a soft spot for link building and still thinks it works. But his read on where it sits now is a structural one:
“I think in the AI era, as search engines have gotten smarter, you don’t necessarily need tactical links on that level in the way that I think you used to… I always liken it to fixing the subway system in New York City, whereas you would have to really shut it down for a while in order to put new track down.” — Daniel Horowitz
Links stay in the system the way track stays under the city. What’s changed at the enterprise level is that semantic search is now good enough to infer context without a manufactured link forcing the association. So the budget moves to digital PR.
Which produced the sharpest line in the interview, on why analog activity now counts:
“Doing these analog events where… it’s being cited in social media platforms, that was not something previously that could really be crawled by Google, but now it’s really important and it’s kind of almost where you’re being cited is more important than how you’re being cited.” — Daniel Horowitz
Jeremy’s version of that play is running real-world community cleanup events as link building — local event listings, a press release, actual humans attending. When he ran one for a local asphalt company, one of the people who showed up needed his driveway replaced. The value is layered: coverage, citations, and a lead standing in front of you.
“A six-figure business that was destroyed overnight”
Daniel didn’t discuss the Helpful Content Update abstractly. His wife runs the travel site Alex on the Map, which was pulling 50,000–60,000 visits a month from Google.
“Unfortunately, I have a lot of experience with having a website that was hit by the HCU. My wife actually is a travel blogger… it was a six-figure business that was destroyed overnight.” — Daniel Horowitz
His complaint isn’t that Google changed its mind. It’s the sequence: an ecosystem is told how to write an article and how to structure a site, builds businesses on that instruction, and then the instruction is revoked without a path back. As Jeremy noted, genuine full recoveries to pre-HCU levels have been vanishingly rare.
Enterprise SEO is evangelism, not algorithms
What Daniel has come to love about the enterprise side isn’t technical. It’s internal.
“The big thing that I’ve really developed a love for in the last two years of doing enterprise is the evangelism aspect of going into an organization… A lot of it is working cross-functionally with product marketing, growth marketing, and the web team to collaborate and make sure that SEO is seen as a priority. I’ve really found that I love that because it’s less connected to algorithm updates and more connected to building a team.” — Daniel Horowitz
With long B2B sales cycles, SEO is rarely the loudest priority in the building, which makes persuasion the actual skill. It’s the same problem Gus Pelogia described from Indeed on this show: connecting the dots to value rather than defending a keyword list.
His most portable tactic there is an SME interview series — sitting down with product people and asking what they want customers to know, then turning that into use-case content mapped to real personas, from chief data officers to engineers. Jeremy’s endorsement of the format was characteristically direct: experts know the material cold and fear writing, so the medium is the record button. Half an hour of talking is 30,000–40,000 words of raw material.
The vanity metric they killed
The old program at Informatica was head-term based, and Daniel is unsparing about it:
“We would look at ‘what is master data management’ and the only metric used was whether our article hit the first page of Google for at least one day of the quarter. That’s not a strategy, that’s just vanity.” — Daniel Horowitz
Switching to a topical-authority frame changed the question. Someone who already knows what master data management is doesn’t search the definition — they search how to use it, in their situation, with the tools they already run. “What are the use cases of generative AI for master data management?” is a query with a buyer behind it.
Losing traffic and gaining revenue
The most counterintuitive result in the episode:
“With AI search, we’ve lost a lot of traffic, but our conversion rate has actually increased quite a bit because of the types of content we’re putting out.” — Daniel Horowitz
The mechanism is simple once you look page by page. The definitional article that lost the most traffic never converted anyway. The middle-of-funnel material — product comparisons, deeper research an AI Overview can’t do for you — carries the purchase intent, and those visitors engage with the on-site chatbot at much higher rates.
Daniel’s framing for stakeholders is blunt: Google has already taken the top-of-funnel content, there’s no getting it back, and that traffic was never as correlated with SEO success as the dashboards implied. He also pushes past the blog as the default container — use-case pages carry the explanation, with blogs, video, podcasts and webinars supporting them. “We’re an enterprise organization, not a publication.”
Rented land, and whether anyone actually likes Google
The diversification argument came with a caveat most people skip. Daniel is working more with paid and organic social, doing sentiment analysis, and creating for LinkedIn, YouTube and Reddit — surfaces that used to sit outside anyone’s definition of SEO. Jeremy’s addition, from a conversation with Matt Brooks of SEOteric: a successful article should also be reposted or re-angled on LinkedIn, Substack and Medium — a dozen barnacles you can attach to, because the job is being discovered online, not ranking one domain.
But Daniel won’t pretend the trade is free:
“Building social channels is hard because you don’t control the algorithm or even the platform. With your website, there was more you could do to differentiate yourself — work on your content strategy, interlinking, site speed, UX. Whereas all TikTok platforms are the same, and those algorithms are more of a black box than Google ever was.” — Daniel Horowitz
He also thinks the volume-based content model is finished: “if you’re a volume-based site, I don’t think it can work anymore.” The one place creators are still doing well is YouTube, because Google has an incentive to keep people inside its own ecosystem — and even that, he notes, has a shelf life. With Apple signaling an AI-search-first experience in Safari, the open question is whether people ever loved Google or simply accepted the default.
His one tactic: internal linking
Asked for something a listener could act on this afternoon, Daniel picked the least fashionable answer available.
“Honestly, it’s so basic that it’s ridiculous — internal linking has been so important. Creating that semantic relevance between pages on your website. I’m shocked at how many businesses just don’t do it and don’t consider how things relate to each other.” — Daniel Horowitz
Extended outward, it becomes an ecosystem argument: publish on LinkedIn Pulse and Medium, link it all back into the site, and make the relationships legible to whatever is crawling you. Jeremy’s practical addition — don’t force a click, but give a reader who is already engaged enough contextual next steps that the path onward is obvious.
Connect with Daniel
Daniel Horowitz is Senior SEO Manager at Informatica. He’s not blogging much these days — a casualty of the same update that hit his household — but he’s active and easy to find on LinkedIn.
Listen to the full episode on Castos. For more conversations like this one, explore the Unscripted SEO archive, or try the keyword clustering tools at SEO Arcade.
