What is Link Velocity Trend (LVT) ?

Link Velocity describes the speed of link growth to a page or domain. Link velocity trends describe the trends of link growth, i.e. how fast or slow the link growth to a page or domain is in a given time span. We also have more details about Link Velocity Trends described in Chapter "Link Analysis Concepts".

Depending on the time window you’re looking at these can be different trend indicators. Typical time windows to look at for link velocity are month, quarter, half-year, full-year or two years.

How can seeing LVT ratios help you?

The Competitive Landscape Analyzer (CLA) can be used to show Link Velocity Trends of your domain compared with your competitors. Google does look at backlink profiles and growth of backlink profiles over time.

It is imperative that you understand the natural link growth patterns in your niche to be able to compete with other players. Your goal is to understand: what link growth is ‘natural’ in your niche, for your keyword, for your country.

One thing is sure - there is no absolute number that is right for all industries.

The CLA can show you:

• Link Velocity Trends

• average link popularity growth per month in the last 4 months

• average link popularity growth per month in the last 6 months

• average link popularity growth per month in the last 12 months

• average link popularity growth per month in the last 24 months

You can use these metrics to analyze the backlinks of your domain and up to 10 competitors. You can see how your site compares with domains that rank on a page one of Google. You should then aim to blend in and then win.

TL;DR

Analyzing Link Velocity Trend ratios in your niche gives you the insight to help you rank on page one of Google.

Technical Details and examples

The Competitive Landscape Analyzer (CLA) uses five metrics for the ranking keywords metrics:

The metrics are described in the SEO Metrics chapter.

Histogram Results

In all LinkResearchTools histograms the orange bar is You, the light green is the Total Average, the mid green is the Top 5 average and the dark green is the Top 3 average. With the CLA the idea is to try and blend in and not stand out. In the example below we can see that it looks strange that our site has more backlinks from domains that have very high average link growth over the last 24 months. There might be a good explanation for this, but it certainly needs further investigation:

To analyze what type of links these are you can go to the Detail Table and filter the table to show the links that may be of interest

Filter Settings:
Target URL = yourdomain.com
LV24m= From 1000 To 100,000

The results showed that all these results originated from two different places. The NoFollow links were all from YouTube. These links should not cause a problem but in large quantities it could look like some kind of automated spamming of YouTube. The other is from a signature in a popular forum. The forum attracts a lot of traffic, but is way off topic from our example domain. In this circumstance it may be worth investigating further to find out if these links look unnatural.