Alex Nicholas

Ranking websites primarily through link building. Creating content is easy these days, links are the difference.

[Alex Nicholas @D_C_SEO]

Recovering sites from the updates that Google has dished out over the last year or so - and link building in general.

Why have so many sites been slapped sideways (by that obviously I mean down) by recent updates?

The answer, I believe, in many instances is a definable problem with link building and anchor text.

And whilst many SEOs who've been in the industry for a long time will be rolling their eyes and saying something to the tune of "well obviously, you plum", it's worth reiterating, especially in light of the shifting landscapes and the number of new people entering the space thanks to the ease of content production.

Anyway, to give you a birdseye view of the situation as I see it is as follows, and yes, it pretty much solely evolves around your backlinks, is the relationship between the power and anchor text of the linking site and your site.

For example
✅ If you own a strong site that's being linked to by another strong site, DR80+ (yes, I know that's a bit of a whatever metric) - exact match won't really hurt you. Do what you want to a large extent.

🧐 If you own a medium strength site of around DR50 and it's being linked to by another medium strength site then be careful. Consider using slightly longer and at best, partial match anchor text.

🚩 If you have a weak site and you're being linked to with exact match anchors from other weak sites, this will cause you a problem long term. Always has, and always will... Branded links are your friend here.

Obviously, there are many variations in between, but this is only an overview and just my observations over the years.

Recovering from severe penalties
But what if you have been hit by something like the HCU update, is there any chance of recovery?

Contrary to popular opinion, yes, I believe there is, but it'll require a deep analysis of your link profile to weed out the damaging links, which will be time consuming and quite possibly expensive (in the thousands) due to the tool set that'll be needed.

Ahrefs alone won't cut it because you need to get to the root of the problem and uncover exactly which links are causing you problems, not just a percentage of them.

This requires an extensive and dedicated software stack that the vast majority of website owners will never of even heard of.

It's only then, when this deep analysis has been carried out that it's worth uploading your disavow file to search console.

And speaking of the disavow file, if you are able to unearth all the harmful links by yourself, you must make sure those disavowed links have ACTUALLY been visited by Google because them saying that they'll visit them and actually doing so are 2 different things.

On the whole, they're pretty good at crawling the file but you do need to make sure.

So after a week or so, I suggest using the colinkri. com software to make sure the links in the disavow file have been seen and crawled.

Internal links
Watch your internal links. If you're continually internally linking to a key page with exact match text over and over again, you're asking to be slapped at some point if you haven't been already.

SOME exact match internal links are fine, but ALWAYS look to vary it using 3, 4, 5 and 6 word partial matches as well.

When building links
There are some basic things to study for when looking for backlink targets:

✅ Does the site you want a link from rank for any decent search terms?
✅ Does it rank for high CPC search terms?
✅ Does it have a decent amount of traffic in general? This one will be subjective, but it needs to have a history of sustainable traffic levels.

Timescales
Although you can get some significant movement quite quickly when building links, it should ALWAYS be seen as a mid to long-term strategy that targets multiple pages.

[Alex Nicholas @D_C_SEO]

@indexsy @boringlocalseo Advise

[Alex Nicholas @D_C_SEO]

@mikefutia CLAUDE

[Romàn @romanbuildsaas]

Claude just KILLED manual outreach. 💀

I used to grind for hours on LinkedIn.

Now? My AI stack does it better.

❌ No "Hey {{first_name}}" spam
✅ Natural, multi-step conversations
✅ 12+ hours saved this week

The result: 500+ conversations with human-level reply rates.

I packaged the entire system (prompts + workflow) into a FREE doc.

Want it?

Repost ♻️ (so others see it)

Comment "CLAUDE" & I'll DM you.

[Alex Nicholas @D_C_SEO]

@WPESupport are your servers down in the uk? I can’t access 1 of my sites

[Alex Nicholas @D_C_SEO]

@wpengine are your servers down in the UK?

[Alex Nicholas @D_C_SEO]

@robprogressive Other than that, all good tho mate?

[Alex Nicholas @D_C_SEO]

@indexsy @boringlocalseo Llm

[Alex Nicholas @D_C_SEO]

@iannuttall Hi Ian, I have a question about a data scraping of a certain platform and I figured you would be the man to ask.

Have you got a preferred email I can a ask a quick question on?

DM me if you want

[Alex Nicholas @D_C_SEO]

@VikramVerm25510 Agent

[Alex Nicholas @D_C_SEO]

@ThatsEFM @GammaApp Gamma

[Alex Nicholas @D_C_SEO]

@iannuttall Ian can I ask what software you are you using for content creation these days?

No pSEO, just standard website copy.

[Alex Nicholas @D_C_SEO]

@AdamScottHQ @garethaboyd Pirate SEO?

[Alex Nicholas @D_C_SEO]

@JohnWardHere @garethaboyd Coz that’s where the majority of the money is

[Alex Nicholas @D_C_SEO]

@fba AI

[Alex Nicholas @D_C_SEO]

@carlhendy Dr Foster is decent.

The Wire is excellent but not short.

[Alex Nicholas @D_C_SEO]

@ChrisLDyson 💯

[Alex Nicholas @D_C_SEO]

@iqseo Great, thanks - it’ll be tomorrow at this rate 👍🏻

[Alex Nicholas @D_C_SEO]

@iqseo Andy, are you free by any chance for a quick chat at some point in the next couple of days?

[Alex Nicholas @D_C_SEO]

@garethaboyd The vast majority of people you’ll ever meet ravel in your failure and are happy when things don’t go well for you.

This includes “friends and family” unfortunately…

You end up with the skin of a rhino after a while.