In search engine optimization, off page factors such as link building are even more important than the SEO you do on your website. Link building is not just the quality and quantity of links that you get. How fast you add new links to your website is another important factor.
This is called the link acquisition rate. This is the rate at which new links are discovered by the search engines. A long term steady rate is best.
Let’s say you notice that one of your competitor has thousands of links and you have very few.
Let’s take an extreme example. You decide that you want to do link building and add your website to 1,000 web directories one month and then stop. Your website will have very few links leading up to your link building event, have a massive spike in links and then go back to no new links.
Google will notice this and discount a huge percentage of these links. A steady addition of links is much more natural. You would be much better off if you are determined to add 1,000 directory links, to do this gradually over a year’s time.
How can you check your website’s link acquisition rate?
Majestic SEO has a Backlink History report that shows the number of links discovered each month. This free report allows you to visualize your link acquisition rate.
You can see that the top website gains most of their links over a short period while the lower example gains their links at a regular rate.
Link building done right will reward you with great rankings and targeted traffic. Done wrong, links can work against you.
