The Science Behind Link Building: What Alejandro Meyerhans Taught Us About Ranking

When Alejandro Meyerhans, CEO of GetMeLinks, sat down with Jeremy Rivera on the Unscripted SEO podcast, he didn't just share link building tactics. He broke down the mathematical foundations that separate agencies

that scale from those that guess.

If you're tracking client visibility in AI search or building dashboards to prove ROI, understanding how link signals actually work isn't optional anymore. Here's what we learned from someone who's analyzed hundreds of thousands of backlink profiles.

The Completion Game: Why "Good Enough" Beats Perfect

Alejandro introduced a framework he calls the completion game. Most SEOs think they need to build the perfect backlink profile. They don't.

"You only have to be as complete as the guys in the top three, then this much more," Alejandro explained. "Everything else is excess."

This changes how you allocate resources. If your top three competitors average 200 referring domains from DR 40-50 sites, you need 210. Not 500. That's the insight that turns link building from an art into a science.

The completion game applies across every SEO dimension. If competitors have 50,000 indexed pages and you're starting fresh, you can't catch up on content volume immediately. But if nobody in your niche builds links because they're all directory listings? Go heavy on authority and win while you scale content.

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The Signals That Actually Matter

Ask most SEOs what matters in link building and you'll hear "PageRank" and "anchor text." Alejandro's four years running GetMeLinks revealed a more complete picture:

The core signals:

• Anchor text ratios at both page and domain level (winning profiles show virtually 0% exact match in most niches)
• Reasonable Surfer — body links above the fold matter exponentially more than footer links
• Passage rank — the relevance of text surrounding the link
• Container authority — both the page's URL rating and the domain's overall strength
• Link velocity — proportional to your traffic, brand search volume, and non-search referral sources
• Distance to seed — how many hops you are from manually vetted .gov, .edu, and tier-one authority sites

That last one is critical for AI search optimization. ChatGPT and other LLMs use a tier system where seed list proximity determines trust. A link from NASA might not be topically relevant, but it establishes foundational credibility that cascades through your entire profile.

As Matt Brooks of SEOteric has discussed in his own research, distance to seed isn't just about PageRank flow — it's about trust propagation in knowledge graphs.

Chess, Not Checkers: The Sequencing Problem

"Building a backlink profile is a lot like chess," Alejandro said. "You don't start a brand new website and run it with 100 digital PR type of backlinks because that just doesn't fly."

New sites need foundation first:

1. Basic entity establishment (social profiles, citations, business listings)
2. Knowledge graph signals (author books on Amazon, BBB listings, MCA registration)
3. Local or niche directory links
4. Editorial mentions from relevant blogs
5. Only then: high-authority digital PR

Skip the sequence and you trigger unnatural link profile flags. A brand-new site with zero social presence getting a New York Times link? That's not how real brands grow.

The order of operations changes as you scale the logarithmic PageRank curve. When you're competing against DR 80+ domains, the links that got you there won't get you to the next level. The game resets.

What HCU Actually Targeted (And Why It Matters)

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When Google's Helpful Content Update hit in 2024, Alejandro ran forensic analysis on hundreds of affected sites. The pattern wasn't about content quality. It was about cost versus value to Google's business model.

"Do you publish content that makes Google money? That's the first question Google will make," he explained. "And is it going to cost me a fortune to scan your website?"

Sites that got hit shared characteristics:

• Expensive to crawl (response times over 200ms, bloated URL structures with 10x more pages than actual content)
• Didn't generate ad revenue (no Google Ads, targeting non-commercial keywords)
• Had thin or programmatic content that consumed crawl budget without delivering clicks to advertisers

This reframes the whole SEO conversation. You're not just optimizing for users. You're operating in Google's ecosystem, and your dashboards need to track whether you're giving Google more value than you're extracting.

The LLM Optimization Shortcut

When the conversation turned to AI search, Alejandro had a surprisingly simple answer:

"How do we rank in ChatGPT? Rank on Google. Let's nail the job because all the long tail queries related to your industry, that's how it starts getting additional knowledge."

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LLM optimization is 80% traditional SEO. ChatGPT uses a three-tier system:

• Tier 1: Seed list (.gov, .edu, manually vetted authorities like Healthline in health)
• Tier 2: Niche-specific sites that rank well on Google
• Tier 3: Aggregated search results from Google, Bing, and other engines

If you rank organically for relevant long-tail queries, you feed into Tier 2 and 3. The remaining 20%? Brand mentions with positive sentiment, citations on tier-one domains, and entity presence across platforms.

For link building specifically, anchor text strategy changes. ChatGPT looks for brand name mentions with positive surrounding context. Exact match anchors that work for Google don't move the needle in AI search.

E-E-A-T Is a Cluster, Not a Signal

"E-E-A-T is not a signal, it's not something," Alejandro clarified. "E-E-A-T equals cluster of what?"

This matters when you're building reporting dashboards or trying to diagnose why a client isn't ranking. E-E-A-T isn't a checkbox. It's the combination of:

• Distance to seed in your backlink profile
• Knowledge graph presence (Wikipedia, branded search volume, social platforms)
• Review aggregator data and sentiment
• Citations from industry authorities
• Author credentials and entity recognition

You can't "add E-E-A-T" to a page. You build the cluster of underlying signals over months.

The Data-First Approach to Any Niche

Alejandro's methodology works across every vertical because it starts with data, not assumptions:

1. Analyze the top 3 ranking for your target keyword
2. Bucket their backlinks by DR ranges (30-40, 40-50, etc.)
3. Score topical relevance as a multiplier
4. Calculate velocity relative to their traffic and brand signals
5. Map the completion game — what do you need to match them plus 10%?

Run this at both domain level and keyword level. A homepage competing in a SERP full of high-DR inner pages needs a different strategy than an inner page competing with other inner pages.

"The answer is always in the data," Alejandro said. "Now the data is always incomplete. So there's a combination of the data and the subject matter knowledge on the particular niche."

Practical Takeaways

If you're building link strategies for clients:

Start with competitive analysis. Export the top 3 competitors' backlink profiles from Ahrefs. Bucket by DR, filter for do-follow, analyze anchor text distributions. This is your baseline.

Think in sequences, not tactics. New site? Citations and social profiles first. Established brand? Look at what tier-one sites your competitors have that you don't.

Monitor cost to Google. Check Search Console crawl stats. If your average response time is above 200ms or you have 10x more crawled URLs than indexed pages, you're expensive. Fix technical debt before building more links.

Diversify beyond links. Brand search volume, traffic from non-Google sources, and review sentiment all signal legitimacy. Links without these supporting signals look manufactured.

Track across platforms. Your Google rankings feed your ChatGPT visibility. Your Reddit mentions and YouTube presence feed your LLM trust signals. Siloed optimization is dead.

The Bottom Line

Link building isn't about finding hacks or secret networks. It's about understanding the mathematical signals that search engines use to establish trust and relevance, then systematically building those signals in the right sequence.

Alejandro's framework works because it's rooted in competitive analysis and completion theory. You don't need to be perfect. You need to be slightly better than the sites currently winning, in the dimensions that matter for your niche.

Whether you're tracking this in multi-source dashboards or running manual audits, the methodology stays the same: data first, strategy second, tactics third.

Resources:

• Full interview: The Science and Strategy of Link Building with Alejandro Meyerhans on Unscripted SEO
• GetMeLinks: getmelinks.com
• Download our free SEO Dashboard Template eBook to track link building metrics alongside traffic and conversions

This article is based on Jeremy Rivera's interview with Alejandro Meyerhans on the Unscripted SEO podcast. Jeremy runs SEO Arcade and hosts multiple shows in the Unscripted Podcast network.