Link guru Eric Ward has sparked an interesting debate at Search Engine Land today discussing aggresive link building strategies.
As the owner of a relatively new blog that attracted 10,000 links
in 3 weeks and is about to hit 40,000 links after a couple of months
this subject is pretty close to my heart. Ever since BlogStorm was
launched I’ve had people telling me that Google is going to ban the
site because it is attracting links too fast. People ask questions
like “Aren’t you worried about getting so many links so fast?” My
answer is always – I couldn’t do much about it even if I was worried.
If loads of sites suddenly decide to link to somebody there isn’t
anything the site owner can do about it. Certainly the search engines
are not about to start banning a site just because lots of people
naturally link to it.
On the other hand if I went out and bought 10,000 links to a new
site then it is likely to take 18 months to 2 years even to rank for
its own name.
If it can be algorithmically trusted as being natural,
there is no such thing as too many or too fast.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
I agree. As long as link building is natural there is nothing to be afraid of.
Even if Google Banned you, you would still have all those links.
I know link building can be an important tool in the seo tool box, They have to be very careful as well only to link in a related way. Natural links are good but still you have to make sure the content is related to each other.
I see the question about how the speed of acquiring links coming up on forums again and again. I think people invest too much time worrying about the speed as opposed to figuring out a way to build links naturally. Like you said, if it is happening naturally, then there is nothing to worry about. SE algorithms are advanced enough to figure out if the new acquired links are natural or not.
As Carl mentioned you would still have all of those links (I’m impressed) and because they are natural you will get traffic from them. Do you do analysis on what percentage of your traffic that originates from search engines and what comes from links? It would be interesting to know.
Google analytics shows a fair amount of traffic from search. At present most is from social media sites which tends to drown everything else out.
What about directory submissions. Free directories of about 8000 sites are available – so is this fine?
I would steer well clear of directory submissions. Maybe submit to about ten paid ones such as Yahoo and Business.com
I agree about the submitting to directories and I sometimes wonder how much attention google really pays to links. I have managed to get excellent ranking with just one link on some keywords though this does depend on how well the competition has optimised their site. Does someone know if its possible to ge banned if you have too many links from just one site or does google just ignore these?
If you use natural links, then you will receive a lot of traffic and therefore will not be penalised by Google. You just need to make sure everything you link relates to what you are linking to. Submitting your website to directories is also an important factor of maximising the traffic to your site. The problem is overkill; knowing when to stop. If you use too many links, then this could be considered as ’spamming’. You need to plan your links thoroughly and base them on competitiveness.
Great article!
Great article. I was wondering If my site was building to many links to fast. I guess not camparied to you great results. Thanks Again.
William
I know this is an old post but honestly, the “how many links is too many” debate is total BS.
“On the other hand if I went out and bought 10,000 links to a new site then it is likely to take 18 months to 2 years even to rank for its own name.”
If the above paragraph was actually true, anyone could do an aggressive xRumer campaign and get any new promising competitor’s site banned in the SERPS quickly.
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