The velocity spike nobody audits until it's a penalty

The velocity spike nobody audits until it's a penalty

Word from a few SaaS profiles this month: teams celebrating a 600-link month, then ghosting their own data when rankings tank in week six. Spotted the pattern in three Majestic histories — a flat line, a vertical needle, then a slow bleed of lost RDs as Google quietly discounts the burst.

The mistake is reading link acquisition as cumulative and never as a rate.

What the disciplined operators do —
— Chart new RDs per week against your traffic curve. A links spike with no traffic response is Google sandboxing the batch.
— When you buy in bulk, drip the indexing. The brands that survive bursts stage them over weeks, not a Tuesday.

Multiple teardowns end the same way: the spike wasn't the win, it was the invoice for the correction. Watch this space.