---
title: "Does faster backlink growth move rankings faster?"
url: https://seomadman.com/research/backlink-velocity-ranking-movement-ahrefs-study
section: research
published: 2026-09-19T00:00:00.000Z
modified: 2026-09-19T00:00:00.000Z
author: Adam Hafez
topics: ["Link building"]
---

# Does faster backlink growth move rankings faster?

## The short answer

Ahrefs tracked followed-referring-domain growth for 200,000 top-20 pages across 10,000 keywords over three months and found no observable relationship between how fast a page's backlink count grew and how its ranking position moved. Position 1 pages typically gained referring domains at 5 to 14.5 percent per month, but that pace declined by rank without predicting rank changes.

## Key takeaways

- Ahrefs analyzed 200,000 pages across 10,000 non-branded keywords, tracking followed referring domain growth over three months using its own backlink index.
- Position 1 pages typically gained new referring domains at a pace of 5 to 14.5 percent per month, and the median pace declined as rank fell.
- Ahrefs found no observable relationship between how fast a page acquired backlinks and how its ranking position moved during the study.
- The study's authors state directly that their results can neither support nor disprove a causal link between link velocity and rankings.
- Ahrefs notes that not all links carry equal weight and that backlinks are only one of many ranking factors the study could not isolate.

"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.

## Sources

1. [How Many New Backlinks Do Top-ranking Pages Get Over Time [New Data by Ahrefs]](https://ahrefs.com/blog/backlink-growth-study) - Ahrefs (primary)
2. [What Is Link Velocity?](https://ahrefs.com/seo/glossary/link-velocity) - Ahrefs