Link Building: How Fast is Too Fast?
As the probably most important off-page SEO factor, back links (aka inbound links) pointing to your site are generally weighted by number and relevance. The more links a site has from authoritative and related sites / pages, the better ranking potential it has. In addition, proper use of anchor text can also boost your SERPs (remember the Google Bombing Story?)
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 penalized if it gets too many links over a very short period? This deserves some discussion because there is still confusion out there.
· Behavior of links including appearance and disappearance over time.
· Increase, decrease and freshness of links as a trend.
· Anchor text freshness and how it changes over time.
Let’s use a fictitious scenario to illustrate my point. Let’s say I have some, ah, rare and, ah, very interesting celebrity photos that have never been seen before and are therefore guaranteed to create a huge buzz . I put them on my website and they are picked up by CNN and some other major news outlets. Soon, all major social networking sites and forums are talking about these photos, thus creating links to the site. Then, millions of visitors hit my site for a peek and start referring the photos to each other, thereby creating tens of thousands of additional links to my site (OK, daydreaming stops here).
Will I get red-flagged by search engines for getting a huge number of links overnight? I don’t think so. I am basing this opinion on the axiom that search engines are smart enough to recognize these links as coming from all kinds of sources (news, social networking, blogs, forums, images, and so on). After all, in this fictitious case study I did not launch a link campaign ; all those websites spontaneously linked to me. My site’s popularity may have mushroomed quickly, but it did so naturally, not artificially.
Of course, the above scenario is very much the exception and was only used for illustrative purposes. In real life, if you have a new site or are using mainly link farms (which, as we all know, are frowned upon by search engines) or directories to direct traffic to you, I suggest you slow down and get more focused on link quality and relevance to avoid setting off alarm bells with Google.
We should all be so lucky.