"natural" link building

everyone seems to think natural is slow, gradual, at least that's what I have always thought...
But then I think about it... did a story that gets published in a major paper, or a huge press relesae or all of a sudden hits a craze really get slow gradual link acceleration?
or do they spike up fast and then people don't all return, but then some do for awhile, and then they tell their friends, and then soon there's another big spike?

twitter... it was slow and gradual WITH spikes as more and more people talked about it, and the spikes were greater...

THen again, perhaps the search algo also wants to know how often a term is searched for?
If for example i search for site.com and theres 3 backlinks, and then 1 month later only I search for site.com and thers' 100 and google sees "site.com" searched stay the same or go down, maybe it doesn't rank as well because it's likely those backlinks were without branding and people aren't searching for it specifically?
I don't know I'm just ranting I think.

your post confused me. I don't get the point of this?

supposedly the 'link velocity' is an important factor in SEO...
What I'm wondering is what a "natural" link velocity is exactly and how to achieve it.

My guess is that high link velocity would be looked on favorably by google from a trusted site. High link velocity from a young domain, no traffic domain, no PR domain would be suspicious.

There are loads of factors to take into account with link velocity..It's difficult to get an exact idea of what a good velocity is but one of the easiest ways to do it is to look at all the competitors in your niche, diving their backlinks by the number of days theyve been online. This will give you a rough idea of what your link building speed should be.

If you have an oldish site, it is true that you wont get the same penalty as a new site for rapid link building but you could still get a penalty. If you had a five year old site with slow link building for five years and then suddenly 30,50 etc links a day it would be unusual and Google will notice this.

I find that http://www.majesticseo.com can be quite useful for looking at the growth of link building on a site. The number of links is usually out as they do not have the same scope as yahoo but the trends on the graph are usually pretty close.

That is a great site.