Link Building: How Fast is Too Fast?

As one of the most important off-page SEO factors related to ranking, back links pointing to your site are generally weighed by number and relevance. The more links from authoritative and related sites/pages, the better ranking potential a site has. In addition, proper use of anchor text can also boost your ranking (remember Google Bombing Story? Poor Dubya!). But today we’ll discuss a different aspect of link building – what is the optimal rate (and speed!) for link building and will a site be punished if it gets too many links over a very short period? This deserves some discussion because many are still confused.

It’s not a secret that search engines (at least Google) evaluate links also by it freshness and age. According to a Google patent, perimeters that it applies to detect and prevent spam include:

• Behavior of links including appearance and disappearance over time.

• Whether links grow more or fewer as a trend and how fresh they are.

• Anchor text freshness and how it changes over time.
So the common sense is that a gradual and steady link popularity tactic is advised. But my hunch is that building a great number of links ove
ight will not necessarily trigger a red flag; all depends on the status of your site, how you build links and where they come from.

I’ll use a scenario to illustrate my point. Say, I have some Carrie Prejean Underwear photos that have never been posted before and they’re guaranteed to create a huge buzz (hey, thanks for reminding. I know I don’t have them!). So I put them on my web site and they are picked up by CNN and some other major news outlets. Soon, all major blog, social networking sites and forums are talking about these photos and linking to my site. Then, millions of visitors pour in for a peek and tens of thousands of more new links are pointing to my site (OK, daydreaming stops here).

Will I get red-flagged by search engines for getting a huge number of links ove
ight? I truly don’t believe that will happen. The only problem is that not all inbound links will be indexed ove
ight. I am basing my point on the axiom that search engines should be sophisticated enough to know that these links come from various sources (news, social networking, blogs, forums, images and so on). In addition, in this fictional case study, I hadn’t launched a link campaign and all these web sites voluntarily linked to mine using whatever anchor texts they’ve chosen.

Of course, the Carrie Prejean Underwear scenario is rare (imaginary, actually). So, if you just launched a new site or are using mainly directories or link farms (which, as we all know, are frowned upon by search engines) to direct traffic to you, I’d suggest you slow down and get a tad more focused on quality and relevance of links to avoid setting off warnings.