They disavowed to "fix link velocity." The metric they were chasing doesn't exist.

They disavowed to "fix link velocity." The metric they were chasing doesn't exist.

The myth: a sudden spike in links is a velocity penalty you must disavow down.

A content site saw referring domains jump from 900 to 4,200 in two months after a post went viral and got scraped. A tool warned of "unnatural link velocity" and a toxicity spike. They disavowed 3,000 domains to "normalize" the curve.

Result: the viral post lost the top-3 ranking it had earned, because some disavowed domains were legitimate sites that had cited it.

Actually, Google has said there's no penalty for natural link spikes — viral content earns links fast, and that's expected. "Link velocity" as a penalizable metric is vendor folklore.

Reality check: a spike from a hit post is success, not a symptom. Disavowing it punishes your own win.