Who is Ihor Rudnyk?

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Ihor Rudnyk is a Ukrainian entrepreneur, marketer, and SEO expert with 15+ years of experience. He is the Co-Founder and CEO of Collaborator – a global platform for digital PR placements and link-building.

In this interview, Ihor shares his story, insights on how link building has evolved, and what it takes to build a trustworthy brand in the world of SEO.

To start, could you introduce yourself and explain what your company does?

Hello everyone. My name is Ihor Rudnyk, and I’m the Co-Founder and CEO of Collaborator, a worldwide PR distribution marketplace. We connect SEO specialists and businesses that need authoritative mentions with publishers looking to monetise through guest posts and sponsored content.

Our main focus is high-quality link-building and brand visibility. The mission is simple: make digital PR more transparent, accessible, and scalable for everyone.

How did your career lead you to launching this business?

I’ve been in SEO for over a decade, and my journey started in a very “classic” way: niche sites, experimenting with monetisation, exploring backlink services, and learning from the ground up.

Around 2012, when Google Penguin dropped a bomb on low-quality links, everything changed. Quantity, speed, and anchor stuffing stopped working.

While promoting my own websites and providing SEO services for clients, I noticed the same problem over and over again: people kept choosing link placements based only on Domain Rating and completely ignoring traffic, relevance, placement section, or site health. There were hundreds of wasted budgets because of poor publisher selection.

Then I had this idea: if we could combine smart SEO filters, performance metrics, and easy publishing workflows, the market would see some real benefits.

So, together with my co-founder, Mykhailo Shcherbachov, we built Collaborator to solve this problem and provide SEOs with a platform where advertisers can save time and increase ROI, while publishers can earn stable revenue from placements they control.

Today, Collaborator is a thriving and expanding marketplace, and I’m very proud of the work we’ve done for the SEO community.

What strategies have helped you grow your organic visibility since launch?

In the early days, like many other founders, I wanted fast results. But the longer you play this game, the more you understand that Google rewards what people genuinely find valuable.

So, we took a deep breath and committed to slow but steady, craft-focused SEO.

We started building things that actually help SEOs and marketers do their work more efficiently. We rolled out free tools, checklists, detailed blog guides, and quality educational content that is curated, not just rewritten from someone else’s blog.

For example, when we launched our SERP Simulator, we thought a few dozen people might use it. But then SEO communities started sharing it on their own, bloggers referenced it in tutorials, and it naturally picked up links along the way. The same story happened with our Bulk URL Checker and SEO Checklist. We didn’t have a grand marketing plan, we just focused on solving everyday problems our users face.

An interesting thing happens when you teach someone how to choose good websites for PR or how to avoid toxic backlinks: they remember you as the brand that helped them save time and money, and, eventually, they come back as users.

There was no viral breakthrough moment. It felt like pushing a snowball uphill, until it finally started rolling on its own. Right now, we have onboarded publishers in 140+ countries, and we continue to grow our catalogue each month, not just via selective outreach, but organically as well.

Our traffic is the sum of hundreds of small, consistent actions, and that is the kind of traffic that is high-quality and here to stay.

What important lessons has your SEO experience taught you so far?

Honestly, I’ve learned more from mistakes than from successes. In the beginning, I paid far too much attention to vanity metrics, which were numbers that looked impressive on the surface but didn’t really move a business forward. But years ago, long before Collaborator even existed, my co-founder Mykhailo and I started to realize that the real long-term value comes from building products that can grow into brands. This understanding appeared 9-10 years ago, at a time when almost no one in SEO talked seriously about building a brand. Today, it’s clear that this mindset shaped every big decision we’ve made since.

Another big lesson was learning to experiment without fear. You can’t build anything meaningful without breaking a few things along the way. But when you test small, stay curious, and measure everything – the wrong turns become affordable lessons instead of disasters.

And the biggest insight of all: if someone types your brand name into Google – you’ve already won that small battle. Branded traffic is a signal that people trust you before they even click. It doesn’t depend on algorithms nearly as much as everything else does.

SEO changes constantly: tools evolve, ranking factors shift, trends come and go, but building something people remember keeps compounding for years.

Which tools are essential in your SEO workflow today?

We keep our toolset fairly simple. We use SE Ranking to help us monitor rankings and competitors, Ahrefs for backlink insights and competitor/keyword analysis, and Google’s tools like Search Console and Analytics. And of course, we rely on Collaborator for our own link-building campaigns. Tools are great, but the strategy behind them matters more than the number of tools you use.

How do you approach link-building at Collaborator?

Link-building has always been a big part of what I do. Over the years, we’ve tried a lot of different tactics, but we’ve doubled down on what consistently works for us: expert roundups that people genuinely want to share, quality PR mentions, and guest posts placed through our own platform. It’s not always fast or easy – but that’s the point. The links that take effort are usually the only ones worth having.

What sources have shaped your knowledge and expertise the most?

In the beginning, my entire SEO education came from blogs – back when SEOmoz (now Moz) and Search Engine Journal were the holy grail for anyone trying to figure things out. Rand Fishkin’s videos on YouTube were especially influential, and for many of us they were the first real window into how search works. I learned from webmasters who openly shared their experiments, wins, and especially their mistakes.

These days, I get more value from staying connected to the industry in real time: conferences, online events, conversations with other practitioners, YouTube creators, and Redditors who test things. But above everything else, the most valuable resource has always been the community – the people who are experimenting every day and pushing this industry forward together.

What are you aiming to achieve next in your SEO journey?

Right now, our focus is on expanding globally and helping even more businesses get the visibility they deserve through strong, relevant online placements. From an SEO perspective, we’re putting more energy into localized content for new markets, building out useful interactive tools for SEOs, and strengthening our branded presence across search and social. If I look 12 months ahead, my goal is simple: when someone thinks about digital PR and authoritative link-building, Collaborator should be the name that comes to mind. We’re not there yet – but every day, we’re getting closer.

Where can people connect with you or learn more about your work?