Link Velocity
In one line
Link velocity is the rate at which a domain acquires new backlinks over time — and whether the curve looks organic or suspiciously spiky is itself a signal search engines watch.
Going deeper
Link velocity is how fast a domain picks up new backlinks over a window — most simply, 'how many new linking root domains arrived in the last X months'.
Search engines have never confirmed velocity as a direct ranking factor, but the working assumption is that algorithms use it to flag unnatural patterns. A previously quiet site suddenly catching thousands of links inside a short window looks wrong by any reasonable read.
The practical heuristic is straightforward. A spike that lines up with a PR moment or a content hit is fine; a spike with no visible cause warrants investigation, and one branch of that investigation is whether you might be on the receiving end of a negative-SEO push.
Related terms
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO is the umbrella for everything that builds your domain's authority and trust outside your own site — backlinks, press coverage, brand mentions, citations.
SEONegative SEO
Negative SEO refers to outside attacks intended to drag a competitor's rankings down — typically through spammy backlink campaigns or scraped, duplicated content.
SEOPageRank
PageRank is the foundational algorithm Google was built on — modelling links as votes between pages — and it remains the etymological root of how the SEO industry talks about backlinks.
SEODofollow Link
A dofollow link is a regular hyperlink without a nofollow attribute — meaning search engines treat it as a normal authority-passing link by default.
SEOGoogle Penalty
A Google penalty is any drop in visibility imposed for guideline violations — split between manual actions taken by a human reviewer and automatic algorithmic adjustments.