Link Velocity Questions Cleared Up

The savvy webmaster knows link building and good on page optimization are needed to raise rankings, but once they (you?) accept this as truth, then the questions about link velocity start…

• How many links for a new site?
• What anchor text to use?
• What percentage of links go towards main domain?
• Should links to inner pages be obtained/generated?
• And more importantly, if/when a link building campaign is started, how much is too much and how few is too few?

All these questions boil down to what is known as link velocity, which is more than just link volume and the speed in which these links are obtained

In a previous post I discussed overlinking and how it can hurt your rankings efforts but there’s more to be said on this topic of link velocity, and a few myths that need to be dispelled.

1. Velocity
2. Link Velocity
3. SEO Myths about link velocity
   

#1 First off, what exactly is velocity?

From Wikipedia:  velocity is the rate of change of position. It is a vector physical quantity; both magnitude and direction are required to define it. The scalar absolute value (magnitude) of velocity is speed, a quantity that is measured in meters per second (m/s or ms⁻¹) when using the SI (metric) system.

In layman’s terms – velocity is mass / speed

• A car that weighs 2k pounds (mass) going 50 MPH (speed) has 2k / 50 “velocity”.
• A car that weighs 2k pounds going 50 MPH has more velocity that a car going 20 MPH
• A car weighing 5k pounds going 20 MPH has same velocity as the 2 examples above

NOTE: Some of this might be deemed inaccurate misrepresentations of “velocity” to the avid physicist, but this post is being “dumbed-down” to make the information here  more transferable and applicable for the SEO landscape.

In the Wikipedia definition above the bolded terms were velocity, vector, magnitude, direction, and speed.

But we’re dumbing the definition of link velocity down into mass/speed

MASS - Factors involved in defining what MASS is for link building purposes

The “weight” of the car (A.KA. your links being built) can also be referred to as mass or magnitude and is measured by the direction/sources/quality of those links

Magnitude = link volume and link value.  Some links have more of an effect than others, therefore they possess/give more weight to the equation .

Direction = sources of the links such as blogs, press releases, social bookmarking, comments, other sites, rss, directories etc… This is also part of the magnitude equation because an inbound link coming from the direction of an authority site lends more weight than the easier-to-obtain social bookmarking link (for example).

Vectors, to me… is important not merely because it implies varied sources, directions but also taken into account how many vectors are factored into/are part of this equation.

So, to keep this dumbed-down…

Direction of links is important for evaluation of the weight those links pass, but vectors is taken into account, for assessment of the variance of natural inbound linking sources.  What seems natural here, 10 links from PR2 urls in 10 days, or seemingly natural inbound links from a variety of sources?

Speed – This is where most people get worried and where most people get dismayed with their efforts due to practicing “burst linking” methods such as “nuke-ing” some article directories with spun articles, slamming the web 2.0 properties with instant link wheels, with rapid development of profiles that link to you etc…

Speed is a simple concept to understand, really since it means how fast you self-generated these links, but one thing to remember is that speed does not always kill, if the link velocity is deemed natural.

#2 – Which brings us to link velocity, dumbed-down and defined…

Link velocity is NOT the speed by which you generate and/or receive backlinks.   That’s too simple of an explanation and only takes SPEED in to the equation

Link velocity takes into account:

• link direction (links from good sites),which begs the question of what is the…
• intention (are these natural, editorially-given links?), and if these are natural links then from how many…
• vectors (how many sources are linking in)

Note: A good example of good link velocity would be content that got some links from new sites, from multiple sites, and from myriad types of sources.

#3 – SEO Myths about link velocity

Speed does not kill if the link velocity is maintained.  1000s of new backlinks to a piece of content will not cause harm to the object url if the links were naturally given.  There’s dozens of examples I could give you about sites like The Drudge Report or the Huffington Post  whereby they broke a story, or a scandal or something like that, and got 1000s of backlinks in a very short time frame without inducing or experiencing a penalty.

The reason for this “non-penalty” is

• they got links from other political blogs linking to their stories (relevant sites)
• people were “digg-ing” their stories, urls (controversy gets you links from new sources, directions, vectors etc…not just the same slew of social bookmarking accounts linking to your sites all the time on same subject matter)
• links obtained were naturally given (got new link sform new sources, directions, vectors etc,,, in natural way, and natural doesn’t always mean XX# of links/day but rather, random bursts, swells, swoons and spurious acts of links getting picked up…)

Point?:  Link velocity isn’t just speed, there are more factors that go into assessing link velocity besides how many and how soon.

Also… the safest and easiest way to maintain a good link building campaign without devoting too much time and effort into understanding the physics of online link building velocity is to just keep at it and be consistent