Building links too fast

Somebody told me this weekend (a friend who works fulltime in SEO) that building links too fast is a big red flag for Google. He submits sites to directories at a rate of no more than 10 per month and has got several sites listed at number 1 in Google this way.

Has anyone got any thoughts / experience of this?

Sometimes Google may consider getting too many links within a very short time as an artificial link building.
Google prefer natural linking.
To be honest I never heard that any site suffered in this kind of problem.

Well, in the case of directory submissions there is no need to be cautious there because directories have varying submission times, so I would think you can submit to them as often as you like without fear of any penalty.

Also, yes if you receive links too fast it can be a red flag but if is all dependant on how/where you receive the links, as you could create some awesome linkbait that means lots of sites quickly link to you , wny would a search engine penalise you for that?

We have had discussions on this topic many times in this forum.

Honestly speaking, I don't think that the rate/speed of link building can have an adverse effect on your Google rankings.

Had this been possible, then many sites would just build 100s of links daily pointing to their competitor sites and get them penalized. In addition to this, you have no control over other sites linking to you, maybe you create such a killer link bait that attracts a million links in a month. But do you think that you have done anything deserving a penalization?? Of course not!

However, building links with the same anchor text over and over can raise some red flags.

So vary your anchor texts as much as possible to make the links look natural.

Whether your site gets out of an examination after a raised red flag depends mostly on the kinds of links you got. If they are all from free-4-all-sites and all of them have the same anchor text, it is obvious that the links are unnatural and the result of naive link building.

If all anchor texts are different and if the types of pages that link to you vary in a natural way (blog posts, directory entries, social bookmarks, links from news sites, ...) I doubt that there is a problem.

I believe that even links from FFA and Crappy link farms cannot penalize you.

If the links do look un-natural to Google, they will just be devalued, but no inbound links can ever harm your site.

I can take any of my competitor sites and build links to it from FFA and link farms with the same anchor text - but IMO that won't just penalize the domain, the max that could happen is that the links would be discounted.

Because IMHO, anything that is not within your control can never "harm" your site.

Thoughts ??

Yes, the most likely possible negative effects are a devaluation of the unnatural-looking links. I did not mean a direct penalty, but I should have expressed that more clearly. Thanks, pro_seo!

hi guys. Nice conversation! I need some advice, can anyone tell me how many links should I build in a week or a month? If fast link building may get a red flag, then how many links (fast links) would definitely raise a red flag???

12,365,312

There's no absolutes in link building, or in SEO generally. You can't say X number of links will or will not definitely raise a red flag.

Build as many links as you can, but:
a) keep the links looking natural (varying anchor text)
b) vary the locations the links are coming from as already mentioned
c) keep it consistent - don't build links in sudden bursts, ie 1000s in one week, none for a month, then another batch all in one week etc. The only exception to this would be if you had some particularly eye catching new content that was newsworthy, and your links were pointing to that.
d) consider the number of links your keywords/niche would naturally attract. Thousands of links to some obscure topic, that would ordinarily attract only a few links is going to look unnatural.

Yes... He's wrong! Rate of links added is not an issue (for Google... I think it's more risky for Yahoo!)

If he'd done 1,000 directory submissions per week he would simply have gotten to those #1 positions faster!

This is true pro.. But we never come to an answer. Two pieces of advice are given.
1) No back links can hurt you
2) too many links with the same anchor text can raise red flags and possibly trigger a BLOOP (back link over optimization penalty)

Both answers can not be true.

The argument that if links could hurt you than you would do this to a competator to me is a bit flawed. This would mean you would need to spend money doing something that may help your competator in the hope that it may hurt them. I would think that google would not really be too worried that people are spending money building links for their competators.

The BLOOP penalty though has been dicussed on many boards. I have seen pteam (among others) offer evidence of this penalty. I have seen others argue it is a manula penalty not an algo penalty i.e. to many backlinks to quick generates human investigation. Then a judgement is made by that person as to wether a penalty should be implemeted (the penalty that is mentioned most often are the -30 or -900 penalties).

Even the same anchor text is not really the only point. i.e. The most common anchor text i have to my site is my business name. I would guess that this is true for most sites.

Thus I would guess (this is all pure speculation) that if too many links generate investigation manually that links with your comapny name would not appear to be efforts to manipulate SERPs as compared to "buy cheap XXXXX".

The only experiment I ever saw carried out on this issue did (appear to) show you could hurt a sites serps with large amounts of backlinks to fast and changing anchor text http://forums.seochat.com/google-optimization-7/17-000-coop-weight-to-dis-proof-google-bowling-61602.html

Once again both answers given above cannot be true.

To OP in answer to your question though with directory submission you will not generate a penalty. It can take up to twelve months after your submission before you get a link.

Also 'to may links to fast' is more likely (IMO) to be in the thousands not 50 or 60.

Just finishing my comments before being slammed I am not arguing that to many inward links to quickly do or donot hurt you but we keep giving the same conflicting advice....

Rate of unique links from different domains is never a problem... you can develop these at 1 million a day if you can demonstrate that speed with quality.

That isn't really the problem.

If you develop a single link anchor from a domain that has 1 million pages and your link is on every page... technically you developed 1 million links in a day... but that isn't the same a going out and develop a link from this domain 1st, this domain 2nd, this domain 3rd... this domain 1000th, this domain 1,000,000th -- is it?

With the footer style link - SEO's use to see massive abrupt increases in ranks... then Google changed the way they factored sitewide links - and in their observations many SEOs believed "the rate" of development was the problem... ignoring the fact that the sitewide link could just be worth far less than it was before.

Even on the domain that is 1 million page links isn't so bad it's likely worth quite a few links... but certainly the impact one would expect from 1 mllion links...

if you had two identical domains one done each way (both now with 1 million linked pages) the unqiue link domain would win "HAND DOWN" every time and the other won't even be found because this is where Google say "wooohhh... this ain't right - you really only got 1 vote the other 999,999 are not really votes but carbon-copies of an initial vote.

Notwithstanding, even mass links (sitewide) are helpful "IF" you have a wide assortment of other "UNIQUE LINKS" from other "UNIQUE DOMAINS"... then it doesn't look so "ABRUPT!"

Therefore your SEO is really CONFUSED... [NOT SAYING YOU CAN'T GET TO #1 DOING IT HIS WAY]... just that his advice and rational is seriously misguided and absolutely wrong.

Directory submission is included in my checklist for Daily SEOing... I personally think, rate has nothing to do in google...

Ya... if you ever took a close look at their data you'll never see a single domain that doesn't have volumes of sitewide links...

It takes TOO LONG to develop a mass of links 1 by 1 by 1... even with an army of employees... so the BLOOP theory is flawed "UNLESS" you conclude you shouldn't use sitewide links and expect any enhancement beyond "1" link per domain... that's plausible.

One additional thought on this subject... just because you developed a link "today" doesn't mean Google learns of it today... "if 10 links per month is the best desirable"... what happens if Google only crawls 8 of them?

In this instances your 8 'this month' isn't the best rate, and next month if Google picks up the lag and you get 12 links that month... again you aren't getting the suggested best.

Additionally for volumes of link developed in any given month - there is absolutely no way to determine when Google will crawl each - obviously links on high PR pages will get crawled more rapidly but rarely will any one find volumes of PR4-10 linking pages and therefore PR3 and below can take a month or 2 to be credited.

Even sitewides are not credited all at once.