Does faster backlink growth move rankings faster?

“Link velocity” gets treated as settled fact in most link-building advice: build backlinks too fast and Google gets suspicious, build them at a steady, natural pace and rankings follow. Ahrefs tested the ranking-movement half of that claim directly, at a scale most single-site case studies cannot match, and its own conclusion undercuts the tidy version of the story.

What Ahrefs actually measured#

Tim Soulo, then Ahrefs’ CMO, set out to check what the company calls “the vicious circle of SEO”: the idea that top-ranking pages get backlinks faster because they rank well, and rank well because they get backlinks fast. The study pulled 10,000 non-branded keywords with 2,000 to 5,000 monthly US search volume, took the top 20 ranking pages for each one, and tracked how many new followed referring domains each of those 200,000 pages picked up over a three-month window, all sourced from Ahrefs’ own backlink index.

The first result matched the folk theory. Most position-1 pages gained followed referring domains at a pace of roughly 5 to 14.5 percent per month, and that median pace of growth declined as ranking position fell through the top 20. Pages at the top of the SERP were, on average, adding links faster than pages further down it.

Velocity and ranking movement did not line up#

The second question is the one this piece is really about: does the pace of backlink acquisition predict whether a page’s ranking position moves up or down. Here Ahrefs reports a flat result in its own words: the team “failed to distill any observable relationship between the pace of backlink acquisition for top-ranking pages and their respective ranking positions” when it compared link-growth pace against ranking-position changes over the same three months. A page gaining referring domains quickly was not reliably a page climbing the SERP, and a page gaining them slowly was not reliably a page falling.

Ahrefs is direct about what that first finding does and does not prove: “our experiment and its results can neither support nor disprove that theory. To study the cause and effect, we would need to carry out a different kind of experiment.” A static snapshot showing that top pages have more links, or even that they gain links faster, cannot distinguish cause from the same shared confound that shows up across backlink correlation studies: established, well-resourced pages tend to attract both links and rank at the same time, for reasons a link-count comparison cannot separate.

Why we care#

For a technical SEO team, the practical read is narrower than most link-velocity advice implies. Ahrefs’ own data does back the observation that pages ranking well tend to add links at a faster clip than pages ranking below them, so a healthy top result usually does show healthy link growth. What the data does not back is the reverse inference, that accelerating a page’s link acquisition rate will move its ranking position, or that a sudden spike or lull in that rate is itself a signal worth chasing. Ahrefs adds two more limits on top of its own causation caveat: “not all links are created equal,” so raw referring-domain counts miss link quality entirely, and backlinks are only one of many inputs into ranking, so a page’s rank can move for reasons this dataset never measured. Google’s own John Mueller has made a similar point publicly, that it is link quality the company weighs, not the raw rate of acquisition, and Gary Illyes has called “link velocity” itself a term Google does not officially recognize. None of that makes backlink growth irrelevant to watch. It does mean treating a page’s link-acquisition pace as a ranking lever, on its own, is not something this study, or any study cited here, supports.