Link velocity is a temporal metric. Search engines look at unnaturally sudden spikes or drops as potential signs of link manipulation.
Healthy versus unhealthy patterns
A healthy pattern shows steady growth punctuated by spikes tied to legitimate events — a product launch, a viral post, a research report. An unhealthy pattern is a large spike with no matching content event, followed by a plateau or crash.
Example
A B2B site gains 300 referring domains in one week with no launch or PR event. Google's spam systems flag the pattern and the site loses rankings until the artificial links are disavowed.
How SEM Optimiser reports it
The velocity chart overlays new and lost referring domains against major site events so anomalies are easy to spot.
Related terms
- Backlink
A backlink is a hyperlink on an external website that points to a page on your own domain, and is one of the strongest ranking signals in Google's algorithm.
- Referring Domain
A referring domain is a unique external website that links to your site at least once, regardless of how many individual backlinks originate from it.
- Anchor Text
Anchor text is the visible, clickable text of a hyperlink, and its wording signals to search engines what the linked page is about.