As the Linked Open Data Cloud is constantly evolving, both at schema and instance level, there is a need for systems that efficiently support storing and querying of such data. However, there is a limited number of such systems and even fewer benchmarks that test their performance. In this paper, we describe in detail the Semantic Publishing Versioning Benchmark (SPVB) that aims to test the ability of versioning systems to efficiently manage versioned Linked Data datasets and queries evaluated on top of these datasets. We discuss the benchmark data and SPARQL query generation process, as well as the evaluation methodology we followed for assessing the performance of a benchmarked system. Finally, we describe a set of experiments conducted with the R43ples and Virtuoso systems using SPVB.