Link velocity, or the rate at which links to a website/webpage are gained and lost, is one seldom mentioned, yet hugely important ranking signal. If you are gaining links faster than you are losing then, then you have a positive link velocity. A site with positive link velocity usually gets a SERP boost as it shows your site is increasing in popularity.

What is link velocity in SEO?

Link velocity is the rate at which others are linking to your site. Put in another way, it is the rate at which your backlink profile is growing over time. This does not imply that you should maintain higher link velocity to achieve better results in search.

Link velocity is important for those bloggers who are very paranoid about their link profile.

What is LVT useful for? {Link Velocity Trend}

  • Spot domains with declined popularity
  • Links from domains that are paid link networks.
  • Links from domains that are dying (-90%)
  • Links from domains that are “hype” (+200%)
  • Helped spot Penguin problems since April 2012!

What’s the ideal link velocity?

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel!

You just need to figure out the link velocity of your competitors. Do what I call – “competitor link velocity” analysis.

Go to Ahrefs, and type in the URLs of any top-ranking sites in your niche.

Just notice how their link profile is growing over time compared to the content growth on their site.

Like this, do the same analysis for 4-5 sites in your niche.

Now plot the graph containing the link growth curve of each of the analyzed sites.

You now come up with the ideal link velocity plan for your own business.

There you go!

Competitor link velocity analysis is perhaps the best way find the best rate at which to build links.

According to Google“Backlinks should come naturally, along with the content on your site”.

To be frank, it is something that is not possible.

It is clear that Google expects more backlinks, only if you have more high-quality content.

If you got those tons of backlinks in the first month, no backlinks in the second, about 10 backlinks in the third, and finally about 12,000 backlinks in the fourth month. Doesn’t it smell fishy?

The backlinks that are obtained naturally tend to build over time, not overnight.

I can say that having backlinks proportional to the amount of content that you have on your site or blog is essential.

If content on your site grows like this: First month – 5 posts, the second month – 12 posts, the third month – 10 posts, the fourth month – 15 posts so on…

Then backlinks to your site should grow like this: First month – 5 backlinks (preferably to the homepage), the second month – 10 backlinks, the third month – 27 backlinks, the fourth month – 50 backlinks so on…

Keep it random, and just make sure the content and the number of backlinks is proportional.

WHAT ABOUT YOU? 

If you are delivering high-quality content along with some visual-rich content like infographics, it helps you build backlinks naturally over time.

Let me know what are your views on link velocity and what sort of techniques you are using to determine the ideal link building velocity for your blog.