Back-Linking: Is It Possible To Get Too Many Links, Too Fast?
By Anna Johnson on August 25th, 2010Is it possible to get too many back-links, or to get them too fast, so that the search engines demote or drop your site from their rankings?
According to AdGooroo’s Chief Link Evangelist, Eric Ward, there is no such thing as having too many back-links or getting them too fast… as long as the search engines regard the number of inbound links you have, and the pace you get them, as NATURAL.
Essentially, if the search engines regard the number of back-links and the rate of your back-link acquisition as natural, you won’t suffer any penalty.
Furthermore, ‘natural’ includes a sudden surge in back-links, since it’s entirely natural for a website to experience a spike in back-links if, for example, it suddenly receives a lot of publicity. This applies to both new sites and sites that have been around for a long time yet don’t have a lot of back-links.
According to Eric Ward, the search engines’ algorithms are fairly good at detecting the difference between a legitimate upsurge in back-links and one deriving from contrived or artificial back-linking activities (e.g. via some kind of automated software program). One clue? How related are the sites providing all the links. If, for instance, a site suddenly has thousands of inbound links from sites that are unrelated to each other then the search engines are more likely to consider those links to be unnatural.
Eric Ward sums up the issue nicely:
“the real answer to these questions is that it’s not about how many or how fast. It’s all about how natural. If it can be algorithmically trusted as being natural, there is no such thing as too many or too fast.”
Source: Eric Ward, “Aggressively Seeking Links: How Much Is Too Much?” AdGooroo, August 16, 2010
