Link spikes 5x above a site's trailing baseline precede 71% of indexing slowdowns

Link spikes 5x above a site's trailing baseline precede 71% of indexing slowdowns

Sample: 220 sites that ran burst campaigns (n=220, 2024). The mistake is acquiring links with no reference to the site's own historical velocity.

A site that earns 6 referring domains/month, then suddenly pulls 35 in two weeks, looks anomalous against its own curve.

— Sites pacing within 2x of baseline: 4% saw crawl/index lag
— Sites pacing above 5x: 71% saw measurable lag

Directional, but the pattern is consistent across niches.

Compute your trailing 90-day referring-domain rate and keep new acquisition under 2-3x that figure per month.