Gate explainer, first-party measurement

Link velocity, what it is and what a rate-capped pipeline does about it

Link velocity is the rate at which a website or a page is gaining backlinks, per Ahrefs. Google publishes no number for it. The spam policies define link spam by purpose, creating links primarily to manipulate rankings, and carry no threshold for how many links in how many days. So the honest answer to "how fast is too fast" is that nobody outside Google can give you a figure, and Google has declined to. What this page can give you instead is the rate cap the shipped handsofflinks pipeline enforces, a tool to check your own rate against it, and the velocity the audited ledger actually recorded across sixteen sites.

Two definitions, one idea

Search Engine Land's guide puts it as the speed at which a website earns or loses backlinks over a given period. Their 2024 piece adds that it's generally measured by the number of new links gained each month, while AIOSEO counts it per day, week, or month. The unit is a choice. The pipeline on this site uses the ISO week, because that's the bucket the gates are written in.

Where the idea came from

The concept traces back to a Google patent, Information retrieval based on historical data, filed at the end of 2003 and granted in 2008, as Search Engine Journal notes. The patent describes using a document's inception date to determine a rate at which links to it are created, as an average per unit time. It says a large spike in the quantity of back links may signal a topical phenomenon or may signal attempts to spam a search engine. Both readings sit in the same paragraph, which is why the spike itself isn't the verdict. The same filing treats a downward trend in the rate of new links as a possible sign of a stale document and an upward trend as a possible sign of a fresh one, and it also describes monitoring how many links disappear in a given window. Velocity in the patent runs both ways.

What Google has said out loud

In October 2019, answering a question about picking up 200 backlinks in two days, John Mueller said it's not so much a matter of how many links you get in which time period, but whether the links are unnatural or problematic. Ahrefs quotes Gary Illyes calling link velocity a made-up term and notes Google doesn't officially recognize it. Search Engine Journal's ranking-factors review from January 2022 concludes there's no evidence Google uses a signal known as link velocity that can negatively impact rankings. And Search Engine Land says there's no specific speed limit that will make Google suspicious.

What Google does publish is a list of behaviours. The spam policies name using automated programs or services to create links, exchanging money for links or for posts that contain links, and forum comments with optimized links in the post or signature. Those are about method and intent, not tempo. The pipeline's gates below exist for a different reason. They were written against what the ledger showed when nothing capped it.

The gates the shipped pipeline enforces

The homepage gate table states eleven gates are declared in config/policy.json, seven enforced in code and two measured and reported without refusing a job. The four that bear on velocity are below, as printed on that page. The gate check further down scores a planned week against these same four values.

Free tool

Check a planned week against the velocity gates

Enter what you plan to build for one site in one week. The tool checks the plan against the four gates this pipeline ships, using exactly the values printed on the homepage. Everything runs in your browser; nothing is sent anywhere.

Site-weeks by links built

Exact integers from the audited ledger copy, 413 rows, 2026-06-25 to 2026-07-31. A site-week is one target site in one ISO week. The LIVE column counts site-weeks by how many of their links verified LIVE, so the 2 site-weeks with no LIVE link are absent from it.

What the ledger measured

The homepage reports 413 links built across 16 sites over 37 days, of which 232 passed audit, so 181 failed. Of the 232 live, 174 are dofollow and 58 nofollow, and they land on 10 distinct referring domains in total. The velocity figures below were computed by code on 2026-09-06 from the audited ledger copy, a recount of the 413 rows bucketed by ISO week, published in the band table under the gate check. They describe one operator's history and are printed here because they're the data the gate values were written against, not because they predict anything.

Two things stand out. Builds landed on 13 of 37 days, so the raw rate was bursty rather than steady, with one day carrying 91 of the 413 rows. And the dofollow share of 75.0 percent sits below the 0.78 centre of the G03 band, which is the kind of drift G03 was written to report rather than hide. The 7 Telegraph posts in one site-week are the reason a per-channel cap exists at all. Spread across channels, the same count looks nothing like it does stacked on one host.

A link that can't be crawled has no velocity

Google's SEO Starter Guide says the vast majority of the new pages Google finds every day are found through links. So a backlink only counts toward any rate once a crawler can reach it, and a crawler reaches it through a sitemap, an internal link, or a rel value that lets it follow. Google says links marked sponsored, ugc or nofollow will generally not be followed, recommends the ugc value for comments and forum posts, and asks that paid placements carry sponsored. The pipeline reads the served rel attribute after publish before a row may say live, and it probes a fixed sample of six of its publishing hosts, two of them rejected channels, for a sitemap line in robots.txt read as Googlebot. As of 2026-09-06, 33.3 percent of the six hosts probed, all of them listed in the table below, carried that line.

How to measure your own link velocity

Pick the unit first. AIOSEO lists per day, week, or month, and mixing them is how people end up comparing a weekly count to a monthly one. Then pick a source of truth for the count. The Search Console Links report shows a sample of internal and external links and is not a full list of every link, though its top linking sites view shows which sites contain the most backlinks to you. A ledger you keep yourself, with the publish date and the served rel value per row, is the only count where you control the denominator. Divide new links by sites and by weeks, and keep lost links in a separate column, because the patent that started this conversation counts links that disappear in a window as well as links that appear.

Questions people ask about link velocity

Is there a safe number of links per week? Not a published one. Google's spam policies contain no numeric threshold for the rate or number of links, and Search Engine Land says there's no specific speed limit that makes Google suspicious. The 12 per site per week on this site is a cap the operator wrote against a ledger where 3 of 72 site-weeks went past it, read from config/policy.json. It isn't a Google number.

Is link velocity a ranking factor? Search Engine Journal found no evidence that Google uses a signal by that name that can negatively impact rankings, and Ahrefs notes Google doesn't officially recognize the term.

Does a sudden spike get a site flagged? The patent says a large spike may signal a topical phenomenon or may signal spam, and AIOSEO states Google's algorithms won't solely rely on sudden changes in velocity to decide a link scheme is at play. What Google does list as spam is method, such as automated programs or services that create links.

Do lost links count? In the patent, yes, it describes monitoring the number of links that disappear in a given window. On this site a row only reads live after a post-publish re-fetch and a crawl-path check, and 181 of 413 rows never reached that state, 130 published but undiscoverable and 51 dead, per the homepage.

Does nofollow count toward velocity? Google says links carrying nofollow, ugc or sponsored will generally not be followed. The pipeline still counts them as built and as live, and reports the dofollow share, which was 174 of 232 live links, under G03 without blocking.

Where these numbers come from

Every definition and quote above links to the page it was read from, read on 2026-09-06. Gate values are as printed in the homepage gate table, which reads them from config/policy.json in the shipped package. Ledger velocity figures were recomputed by code from the audited ledger copy on 2026-09-06, bucketed by ISO week, and the sitemap coverage figure comes from a first-party robots.txt probe of the six hosts named above. Nothing on this page is a typed estimate.

No ranking or traffic outcome is promised on any page.

Ledger figures are the operator's own history with this method across 16 of his own sites over 37 days and are not a forecast of any buyer's results.

The shipped build v1.0.5 is a rewrite of the code that produced that history and has 2 independently verified live links of its own.