Track the rate of new backlink acquisition over time. Chart link velocity trends and compare against competitor growth rates.
Link Velocity Tracker measures how quickly your site gains new backlinks by bucketing each link by its first-seen date and charting the rate per week or month. The same view is built for competitor domains so you can compare acquisition pace side by side. The surprise for most users: first-seen dates come from crawler discovery, not from the day the link was actually placed, so a spike or dip can lag reality by weeks. Read velocity as a trend across several periods, not as a single-week number.
A concrete input and expected output from the current implementation.
Input
New referring domains with first-seen dates: Jan 15, Jan 22, Feb 3, Feb 9, Feb 18, Mar 2, Mar 11, Mar 19, Mar 27, Apr 6, Apr 10, Apr 17, Apr 23, Apr 29, May 2, May 8, May 14, May 21, May 28
Expected output
Monthly velocity chart: Jan 2, Feb 3, Mar 4, Apr 5, May 5 new referring domains. Total 19 over five months, average 3.8 per month. Three-month trailing average for May: 4.7. Trend: 150% growth from January to May.
Each date is bucketed into its month and counted once per referring domain, so the chart shows one value per month (2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 5 = 19). The trailing average of 4.7 = (4 + 5 + 5) / 3 smooths monthly noise, and the 150% rise = (5 - 2) / 2 is the trend line the chart plots.
Each link record carries a first-seen date from the backlink index. The tool groups records into fixed periods (week or month), counts new referring domains per period (deduplicating links from the same domain), and plots the count per period. A trailing average smooths noisy weeks so the underlying pace shows through.
For the competitor view, the tool normalizes raw counts so domains of different size can be compared: it can express velocity as percentage growth (new referring domains relative to the total at the start of the period) rather than raw numbers, because ten new links in a week means something different for a 50-domain site than for a 5,000-domain site.
Because the tool counts first-seen dates from the link index, not placement dates. The linking page has to be crawled after the link goes live, and crawl cadence for low-authority pages can be slow, so expect a lag of days to weeks. Check whether the page's index date lands in a later period before assuming the links are missing.
No. Velocity only measures the quantity of new links, not their quality or relevance. A competitor's higher velocity may be largely spam or private-blog-network links, which carry ranking risk rather than rankings. Check the actual referring domains behind their growth, including authority and nofollow ratio, before treating their pace as your target.
The example and behavioral notes were checked against the browser implementation. Standards and primary references below define the relevant format, formula, or platform behavior.
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