Controlling Link Velocity and Google’s Discovery Time
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Alright. So I’ve talked about link velocity before, but I’ll re-hash it quickly for those who missed it. Link Velocity is essentially the rate at which a site is gaining inbound links on a day to day basis. For anyone on an aggressive link building campaign, you eventually saturate your potential links. You have few left. So the idea is that rather than going from 500 links per day to 0, you slowly tail off the number of links you’re getting per day to look more “organic”
But as with all things, it’s not that simple. This entry has implications for both blackhats and whitehats, but both groups may have to spin it a bit towards their desired tactics to get the full effect.
Basic Premise
Not all sites are crawled equally. Directories are crawled quite slowly, and entries are reviewed even slower. Messageboards are crawled even slower. Popular blogs and social networking sites are crawled quickly(I swear, digg’s RSS must have it’s own GoogleBot or something). This makes it infinitely more difficult to control when Google is seeing links. A stroke of bad luck on crawl times could lead to a nasty trip to the dreaded sandbox.
Even more nasty is if we submit to a lot of social news sites(or digg clones). When we do that suddenly, we eventually drop off the upcoming page/frontpage to all of them at more or less the same time. This can be seen negatively by Google(it does not like seeing links disappear; it wants static liks).
However, like most things, we can take steps to limit their impact.
Tips For Controlling your Link Velocity
- Mix Your Link Types - Since different types of software tends to get crawled differently/more frequently depending on how deep within the website structure one most go to find the new links, mixing up when you do blog posts/messageboards/paid links/whatever should make it so that Googlebot will not have a sudden spike in links(when you otherwise may have done blog comments for example) then a sudden downturn(message boards). It’s a bit more of a pain to do, but it works quite well.
- Look at Each Link From a Bots Perspective
For example, I keep mentioning messageboards as something with a slow crawl rate. Here is my thought process.
If you’re trying to get a profile indexed, and you didn’t post on that account, you have 3 opportunities to get indexed. “Members Online Now”(only about 15 minutes after your profile creation), “Newest Member”(varies) and then the memberlist(little link juice+many pages=slowww crawling). So if that bot doesn’t hit the forum quickly after you, your profile may be dead in the water. Now for an actual forum post itself, it’s slightly faster. Still though, the forum home page(the most likely way Google would find your forum post) will probably have several new links from the new posters, possibly shoveling you back in the queue. And once again, if someone else posts in your category prior to GoogleBot’s arrival, it will take even longer for them to find your post. - RSS Pinging
A alot of different software out there nowadays(blogs, social news, bookmarks, some messageboards, etc) has an RSS feed. While these are checked regularly, if you want to take extra control though, send out the pings yourself via pingomatic. With any luck the GoogleBots will come running, and you can tell when they indexed your backlink within probably about an hour. - Pay Extra Attention to Dynamic Pages/Social News
I know I mentioned staggering your links by software CMS earlier, but take extra care with social news/bookmarking where your site is going to shift page. You do not want this action to be simultaneous. Separate these posts out further than the others to ensure this effect doesn’t hurt you. - Chart out How Many Links You Want Each Day
Keep yourself from burning out your supply in one insane linking day. At the very least, select some powerful links you want to save for your last couple days, so that you can scale down the quantity smoothly.
Not the longest entry, I know. But realistically, there’s not too much you can do to control such factors as these. In any rapid backlink gathering campaign though, it’s worth the effort.
-XMCP
February 20th, 2008 at 4:29 pm
Nice! I’m sitting here trying to think if one could build a tool for that….
-OT
February 21st, 2008 at 4:06 am
Good post XMCP,
If I wanted to further control the discovery rate, and perhaps increase my link discovery rate by getting google to go places where I have dropped my link, i.e. referring sites, how would I go about getting the GBot to go look there? Assuming I can’t use RSS ping as many forums will be used [naturally I might add]. What then is the best way to get those links discovered?
Cheers
February 21st, 2008 at 4:52 am
I have another tip - which mostly works quite well. Just setup a Google Alert on the URL where you do your link building. Then usually in 1-2 days after GoogleBot indexes the page with the link you will get an email. You can then see it as an indication of link velocity. During my tests I found out that this works quite well on small number of new links. If you start building hundreds of new links per day than it won’t be accurate.
February 24th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
[…] has become the limiting factor in every competitive SEO campaign. No wonder that it is one of the topics most frequently written about in the SEOsphere. In spite of that, I wanted to share some of the […]
February 27th, 2008 at 8:21 am
Trouble is, mixing it up is an annoying way to work.
It’s more time efficient to do all social site submissions in one go, all directory submissions in another etc. etc., instead of a little of each each day.
March 2nd, 2008 at 10:58 am
Hmm the Google Alert idea sounds interesting. I’m not entirely sure what was meant by “setup a Google Alert on the URL where you do your link building.”
I set up an alert with the URL of the linking page as the Search Term - is that correct?