How many links is too many
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.
Categories: Link Building
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I agree. As long as link building is natural there is nothing to be afraid of.
bestoptimized August 20, 2007 8:47 pm | Reply
Even if Google Banned you, you would still have all those links.
Carl Coddington August 21, 2007 2:18 am | Reply
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.
Neil Thomas August 21, 2007 3:48 am | Reply
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.
Khalid Hajsaleh August 21, 2007 6:15 am | Reply
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.
Mikael August 21, 2007 10:09 pm | Reply
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.
Patrick Altoft August 21, 2007 10:33 pm | Reply
What about directory submissions. Free directories of about 8000 sites are available - so is this fine?
Martial August 23, 2007 4:13 pm | Reply
I would steer well clear of directory submissions. Maybe submit to about ten paid ones such as Yahoo and Business.com
Patrick Altoft August 23, 2007 6:12 pm | Reply