Link velocity: the metric people worry about and Google does not publish

Link velocity is the rate at which a site gains, or loses, backlinks over a period: links this month against links last month, usually drawn as a chart in a backlink tool.

The worry attached to it is old. In the years when links were bought by the thousand, a sudden spike was a reasonable thing for a spam system to notice, and the folklore survived the era. It is now repeated mostly by people selling drip-fed link packages, where a slow, steady rate is the product.

• No Google documentation names a safe number of links per month.
• Google's representatives have said the systems judge the links themselves, not the pace at which they arrive.
• The link spam policy lists practices: buying, selling, exchanging, automating. Speed is not on the list.

The idea that links should arrive at a steady rate is backwards. Real attention arrives in clumps, and a smooth line is the shape that is hard to produce honestly.

A jump in referring domains is worth a look, not because of the pace, but because of what it usually means. Open the list and read the actual domains.

1. 1

   You know exactly why

   A launch, a piece of coverage, a tool that got shared. Nothing to do. Enjoy it, and write down what caused it.

2. 2

   You do not recognise anything

   Dozens of unrelated domains, often in other languages, linking to one page with a commercial anchor. This is either a negative-SEO burst or an agency you hired doing something you did not ask for. Find out which.

3. 3

   Someone you hired is responsible

   Ask directly where the links came from. If the answer involves a network, placements or a fixed monthly count, that is a policy problem, and it is also money spent on links Google says it mostly ignores.

4. 4

   It is scrapers

   Copies of your pages on parked domains produce link-shaped noise. Common, harmless, and not worth an afternoon.

For the second and third cases, Google's position is that its systems ignore such links in nearly all cases, and the disavow file exists for a manual action or a known paid history, not for tidiness.

Replace the velocity chart with three questions you can answer in five minutes a month.

• How many referring domains would a person in my field recognise. That count is usually small and moving it is the whole job.
• Did any of them send a visitor. A link nobody clicks is worth less than the same link on a page people read.
• What earned them. A tool, a study, a listing, an integration, a conversation. This tells you what to do next, which a chart never does.

Worked example. A month with two new links, one from a guide your buyers read and one from an integration partner, beats a month with forty from a directory network, on every one of those three questions.

The one genuinely useful thing in a velocity chart is somebody else's. The shape tells you how a rival gets attention, which is a marketing plan you can read for free.

• A tall spike on one date: a launch or a piece of coverage. Open the links from that week and see which one it was.
• Repeated small spikes, quarterly: they publish something on a schedule, usually a report or a release.
• A slow steady climb with no spikes: an asset earning links quietly, often a tool or a reference page. Find the page with the most links pointing at it.
• A flat line with a sudden vertical jump from unrelated domains: placements, bought. Nothing to learn and nothing to copy.

Worked example. A rival gains links in three bursts a year, each around a dated report. That is not a velocity finding, it is the discovery that their whole link programme is one publication repeated, which is a thing you can also do.

The chart goes down as well, and the reasons are usually mundane.

• The linking page was rewritten or deleted, which happens to every article eventually.
• The site closed, redesigned, or migrated and broke its own URLs.
• A list was refreshed and your entry was replaced by someone newer.
• Your own URL changed and nobody updated the link, which is the one you can fix, with a redirect.

The last one is worth a monthly check: links pointing at URLs of yours that now return 404 are value you already earned and are throwing away. A 301 to the nearest equivalent recovers it without writing to anyone.