Authority travel distance
Authority travel distance is how far internal authority has to travel — how many link hops — to reach a page from your strongest entry points. Because authority decays with every hop, a page near a strong source inherits far more of it than an identical page buried deep. This is a deliberately renamed concept: in internal-linking terms, distance is the useful idea, not 'velocity'. Here's what it means and how to shorten it.
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A note on the name
Why not “link velocity”? In most SEO contexts, “link velocity” means the rate at which a site acquires backlinks over time — an off-page acquisition metric. That's a different concept entirely. To avoid the confusion, RankForge calls this internal idea authority travel distance: the structural distance equity must cross to reach a page. If you've seen it labelled link velocity elsewhere in an internal-linking context, this is what was meant.
What it measures
Travel distance is the number of link hops along the shortest authority-bearing path from a high-authority source (typically the homepage and other strong hubs) to the page in question. It's closely related to crawl depth, but framed around authority: depth counts clicks from the homepage; travel distance asks how far equity has to flow, weighting paths by the strength of where they start.
LONG distance (4 hops) [Home] -> [blog] -> [category] -> [archive p3] -> [PAGE] 100 ~decayed each hop ...............-> tiny share SHORT distance (1 hop) [Home] --contextual link--> [PAGE] 100 -------------------------> large, lightly-decayed share Same page. The only change is how far authority had to travel to reach it.
Why it matters
Two consequences follow directly from per-hop decay. First, ranking power: a page far from any strong source receives little internal authority and struggles to rank no matter how good it is. Second, crawl frequency: pages far from well-crawled entry points are revisited less often, so their updates are noticed later. Distance is simultaneously an authority problem and a freshness problem.
The high-leverage move: Shortening travel distance to a priority page — one contextual link from a strong, relevant page — often does more than any on-page edit, because it changes how much authority the page receives in the first place.
What shortens the distance
- chevron_rightA contextual link from a high-authority, topically relevant page directly to the target — the most direct way to collapse hops.
- chevron_rightStronger hub and category pages that link out to the most valuable deep content, rather than paginating endlessly toward it.
- chevron_rightReplacing deep pagination chains (page 2 → page 3 → …) with curated links to the genuinely important items buried in them.
- chevron_rightSurfacing priority pages on already-strong pages — the homepage, popular posts, the pillar of their cluster.
Don't flatten everything. The goal isn't one-hop distance for every page — that bloats navigation and dilutes focus, since every link a strong page adds weakens its others. Shorten distance for pages with real commercial or topical value and let minor pages sit further out.
How RankForge uses it
RankForge computes travel distance from the homepage and other high-authority hubs as part of modelling authority flow, and surfaces the distribution — a long tail of valuable pages at large distances is flagged as both an authority and a crawl problem. It then recommends the specific contextual links that would shorten the worst offenders, feeding the depth dimension of the Structural Health Score.
FAQ
Is authority travel distance the same as link velocity?expand_more
No. Link velocity usually means the rate of backlink acquisition over time — an off-page metric. Authority travel distance is an internal-structure concept: how many link hops authority must cross to reach a page. RankForge uses the clearer name to avoid that confusion.
How is it different from crawl depth?expand_more
They're closely related. Crawl depth counts clicks from the homepage; travel distance frames the same idea around authority, weighting paths by how strong the source is. A page can be shallow in clicks but still far from any authoritative source.
What's a good travel distance?expand_more
Keep important pages within roughly three hops of a strong source. The exact number matters less than the principle: priority pages should be close to authority, and a long tail of valuable pages sitting far out is the signal to fix.