Numbers only · Updated Aug 2026
Every conversation about drip-feed starts the same way — clients ask what drip-feed indexing is and what it buys them. This page skips the theory and shows the model we actually use: the tiers, the formula, and two worked examples.
Campaign length is one division away once you know your daily cap:
Safety multiplier: conservative ×0.6 · balanced ×1.0 · aggressive ×1.5. Aggressive on a domain under a year is the one combination we advise against.
| Domain age | Tier | Base limit |
|---|---|---|
| < 1 month | Sandbox | 3 /day |
| 1–3 months | Sandbox | 5 /day |
| 3–6 months | Emerging | 10 /day |
| 6–12 months | Emerging | 20 /day |
| 1–2 years | Established | 40 /day |
| 2–3 years | Established | 75 /day |
| 3–5 years | Authoritative | 120 /day |
| 5+ years | Authoritative | 200 /day |
Source: aggregated SpeedyIndex campaign statistics. These are our working recommendations — not published Google thresholds. Between two speeds, pick the slower one.
Input
500 purchased links → target domain 8 months old → balanced mode.
Output
Base limit for 6–12 months = 20/day × 1.0 → 20 links/day. Campaign: ceil(500 / 20) = 25 days. A day-one blast of the same list would hand a 500-domain spike to an 8-month-old site — the exact anomaly spam systems are built to notice.
Input
2,000 links → target domain 4 years old → balanced mode.
Output
Base limit for 3–5 years = 120/day × 1.0 → 120 links/day. Campaign: ceil(2000 / 120) = 17 days. Note how tier changes everything: the same 2,000 links on an 8-month domain would take 100 days — or would be worth splitting into stages.
Two constraints drive the model. Google's spam systems classify unnatural link patterns, and devaluation happens with no notification — your index rate is the only readout. And crawl capacity is finite: Google's own crawl-budget documentation ties it to a site's health and popularity, so a day of bot attention spent on hundreds of backlink pages is a day your money pages ran on leftovers. Context on scale: in our 2025 study of 1,000,000+ URLs, roughly 40% of new pages were still unindexed a month after publication.
Don't want to do the division by hand? The calculator applies this exact model to your inputs.
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