How to use link velocity to START SUCCEEDING at SEO, CRUSH tougher niches - and dominate easy ones
Hey everybody,
When's the last time you used the term link velocity or link diversity when thinking about your SEO efforts?
In the last few months doing SEO and offering some outsourcing for people - I've noticed a recurring pattern in people when they ask about our services, and many of them make me feel bad when I have to bring them to reality.
They ask things like
"Can you get me some forum backlinks?",
or "I want 1,000 backlinks built to ABC website..."
It kind of makes me cringe when I hear these things - because I don't want to have to tell the person the truth:
"You can build 100,000 forum backlinks to one of your websites, and it's not going to help you as much as 500 diversified links built in the correct fashion over time. If you don't have a plan - you're going to fail." Then I ask them...
"Do you know what link velocity means?"
And they say, "Yeah, the speed at which Google sees your links come in..."
This couldn't be further from the real truth about what link velocity REALLY is in Google's eyes. Remember what it felt like the first time you built profile links for hours on end late at night? Then you didn't see nearly the movement you wanted, and you were disappointed... The feeling won't change, unless you do your SEO correctly and fully understand link velocity... It only matters what the big G sees, not what we THINK, so read on and you'll learn some of the most valuable SEO advice you've ever heard.
People want this magic bullet for SEO to make pages rank in any niche - and have this misconception that just building a TON of backlinks is going to make them boatloads of cash in a niche, if they can JUST get their hands on them.
This isn't true.
Link velocity is a term Google uses for the, "score", if you will, that they give to your websites backlink profile. A backlink profile in simple terms is just the collection of all the backlinks you have in comparison to eachother. It's an all inclusive term in a comparison like fashion.
Link velocity consists of a few different factors:
Link magnitude - This is basically the term they use for the value of links you gain (the authority, page rank, relevance and ranking for certain terms, etc) and the pure volume (number of links) you have in your backlink profile.
Link authority - Are the links coming from the same PR0 blog, or some Pr0 blogs, some pr2 blogs, some other web 2.0 sites, bookmarks and some top level domains? The authority is basically the worth of the link, measured by the value of the opinion of the owner of the website. If the person is someone you'd trust on the street - they have more authority, whereas if it's a 3rd party blogger blog spammed with links, you will have vastly less authority, but still more than a social bookmark which takes second to create.
Link direction - You would think this would be referring to inbound/outbound links, but link direction in this sense is different.
In the simplest terms I can write, think about your money site in the middle of a linking map. Imagine each part of the map broken up into backlink categories such as web 2.0 authority sites, article directories, social bookmarks, and things of the such. The distance from your money site on the map depends on their value, the more valuable they are, the closer, and the less valuable of the link (links like social bookmarks) the farther they are.
If you are only getting links from one website category, such as social bookmarks, then your links have a very narrow direction because all the arrows on the map would be coming from the same region. If you have backlinks from many sources and many different values, they are coming from all over the map - this refers to a WIDE link direction, and is a VERY positive thing.
A wide direction of links, in lower quantity, are exponentially more powerful than a narrow band of links in a much higher quantity. Keep this in mind ALWAYS when doing SEO. Direction is Google's way of viewing the "naturalness" of your links, because naturally a popular website that should be ranked high will be linked to from a high variety of sources all over the web.
Intention - If links appear to be real links, IE, given in the natural course of content creation, they have good intention. If links are found at one source, tons of times, in a short time span, it looks to have bad intention and try to be deceiving the system. The natural path with SEO is the best, and link intention is no different.
Speed - The last factor I'll cover is speed. Speed is simply the speed at which links are brought into your website, commonly mistaken to be the velocity. High speed alone won't kill, as long as magnitude, direction, intention, and authority of your links are balanced, and STAY balanced, for long periods of time.
How these come together is simple - if you can balance all of these and keep them on the good side of the spectrum, you'll stay in the clear. Your rankings will climb, and eventually stabilize, at which point you can slowly cut back the factors, but namely all of them collectively, known as what else than, lowering your link velocity back down.
Once you get it at a sustainable level, leave it there, and it will pay huge dividends. Being consistent in the beginning and sticking to a game plan is HUGE.
PLAN your campaigns, know how many links you want from where, how many which week, and what speed, and replicate it, increase it, bring it back down, and balance it out. This is successful SEO at it's best, and it makes SEO seem like CAKE.
This is called managing your link velocity - which is made up of ALL these factors we've talked about.
The objective (or somewhat abstract) factors make up the "mass" if you will of your backlink profile, and the speed factor (the only real quantifiable one other than the pure number of links) measures the weight it carries - this is your link velocity in very very simple terms.
Think about your backlink profile as the flight path of a football thrown down field. It accelerates out of the QB's hand, FAST, rises, starts to peak, then drops fairly quickly and stabilizes into a receiver's hands, who runs at a steady pace down the field.
Turn your backlinks into the football, you become the quarterback, and throw yourself to the top of the rankings.
Post questions if you have any - and I'll be glad to answer them!
Good luck,
Happy Marketing!
- Brenden Clerget
When's the last time you used the term link velocity or link diversity when thinking about your SEO efforts?
In the last few months doing SEO and offering some outsourcing for people - I've noticed a recurring pattern in people when they ask about our services, and many of them make me feel bad when I have to bring them to reality.
They ask things like
"Can you get me some forum backlinks?",
or "I want 1,000 backlinks built to ABC website..."
It kind of makes me cringe when I hear these things - because I don't want to have to tell the person the truth:
"You can build 100,000 forum backlinks to one of your websites, and it's not going to help you as much as 500 diversified links built in the correct fashion over time. If you don't have a plan - you're going to fail." Then I ask them...
"Do you know what link velocity means?"
And they say, "Yeah, the speed at which Google sees your links come in..."
This couldn't be further from the real truth about what link velocity REALLY is in Google's eyes. Remember what it felt like the first time you built profile links for hours on end late at night? Then you didn't see nearly the movement you wanted, and you were disappointed... The feeling won't change, unless you do your SEO correctly and fully understand link velocity... It only matters what the big G sees, not what we THINK, so read on and you'll learn some of the most valuable SEO advice you've ever heard.
People want this magic bullet for SEO to make pages rank in any niche - and have this misconception that just building a TON of backlinks is going to make them boatloads of cash in a niche, if they can JUST get their hands on them.
This isn't true.
Link velocity is a term Google uses for the, "score", if you will, that they give to your websites backlink profile. A backlink profile in simple terms is just the collection of all the backlinks you have in comparison to eachother. It's an all inclusive term in a comparison like fashion.
Link velocity consists of a few different factors:
Link magnitude - This is basically the term they use for the value of links you gain (the authority, page rank, relevance and ranking for certain terms, etc) and the pure volume (number of links) you have in your backlink profile.
Link authority - Are the links coming from the same PR0 blog, or some Pr0 blogs, some pr2 blogs, some other web 2.0 sites, bookmarks and some top level domains? The authority is basically the worth of the link, measured by the value of the opinion of the owner of the website. If the person is someone you'd trust on the street - they have more authority, whereas if it's a 3rd party blogger blog spammed with links, you will have vastly less authority, but still more than a social bookmark which takes second to create.
Link direction - You would think this would be referring to inbound/outbound links, but link direction in this sense is different.
In the simplest terms I can write, think about your money site in the middle of a linking map. Imagine each part of the map broken up into backlink categories such as web 2.0 authority sites, article directories, social bookmarks, and things of the such. The distance from your money site on the map depends on their value, the more valuable they are, the closer, and the less valuable of the link (links like social bookmarks) the farther they are.
If you are only getting links from one website category, such as social bookmarks, then your links have a very narrow direction because all the arrows on the map would be coming from the same region. If you have backlinks from many sources and many different values, they are coming from all over the map - this refers to a WIDE link direction, and is a VERY positive thing.
A wide direction of links, in lower quantity, are exponentially more powerful than a narrow band of links in a much higher quantity. Keep this in mind ALWAYS when doing SEO. Direction is Google's way of viewing the "naturalness" of your links, because naturally a popular website that should be ranked high will be linked to from a high variety of sources all over the web.
Intention - If links appear to be real links, IE, given in the natural course of content creation, they have good intention. If links are found at one source, tons of times, in a short time span, it looks to have bad intention and try to be deceiving the system. The natural path with SEO is the best, and link intention is no different.
Speed - The last factor I'll cover is speed. Speed is simply the speed at which links are brought into your website, commonly mistaken to be the velocity. High speed alone won't kill, as long as magnitude, direction, intention, and authority of your links are balanced, and STAY balanced, for long periods of time.
How these come together is simple - if you can balance all of these and keep them on the good side of the spectrum, you'll stay in the clear. Your rankings will climb, and eventually stabilize, at which point you can slowly cut back the factors, but namely all of them collectively, known as what else than, lowering your link velocity back down.
Once you get it at a sustainable level, leave it there, and it will pay huge dividends. Being consistent in the beginning and sticking to a game plan is HUGE.
PLAN your campaigns, know how many links you want from where, how many which week, and what speed, and replicate it, increase it, bring it back down, and balance it out. This is successful SEO at it's best, and it makes SEO seem like CAKE.
This is called managing your link velocity - which is made up of ALL these factors we've talked about.
The objective (or somewhat abstract) factors make up the "mass" if you will of your backlink profile, and the speed factor (the only real quantifiable one other than the pure number of links) measures the weight it carries - this is your link velocity in very very simple terms.
Think about your backlink profile as the flight path of a football thrown down field. It accelerates out of the QB's hand, FAST, rises, starts to peak, then drops fairly quickly and stabilizes into a receiver's hands, who runs at a steady pace down the field.
Turn your backlinks into the football, you become the quarterback, and throw yourself to the top of the rankings.
Post questions if you have any - and I'll be glad to answer them!
Good luck,
Happy Marketing!
- Brenden Clerget