It's a simple question and one we have been discussing over at the Warriors forum. There seems to be a lot of misinformation flying about and having had my own experiences of a Google penalty I believe that there is of course such a thing. However - would love to hear some Yays & Nays. Yay to you believe Google gives either Page Rank, de-indexing or ranking penalties to excessive link building. Nay to you think they do not. Feel free to give your explanations too as that would be useful
YAY! Why? Because I have seen pages lose Toolbar PR and de-indexed because of an immediate rush of links to the page. Never an entire site but a specific page, be it home page or internal.
IMO, they won't penalize excessive link building. We can control giving out backlinks to other sites, but we just can't control whatever backlinks we receive from other sites. If someone find that our content is good and worth put on a link to it, he'd do it as he wish, not us.
Excessive link building too fast is a problem. The rate at which you build links is definitely a factor and can easily sandbox your site.
When it say "excessive", it is too much and probably Google will consider it as manipulation. Getting links naturally is what Google recommend hence it got to be done just with normal numbers.
Excessive links is not a problem, but excessive links very fas is a big problem, and google will probably penalize your website for spaming.
I suspect that Google might penalize websites for excessive link building. Excessive is relative. Probably too many links in the same time could be excessive, but I do not think that most of us here should worry. Many websites have used viral marketing to get free publicity. The number of links for these websites is growing very fast and they do not seem to be penalized. I would guess that too many links from the same websites could be a problem, but from a great variety of websites is not.
Whats excessive link building? 100,50,10 links a day? I consistently build links from high PR blogs and my sites rank very well.
I say that it doesn't matter. Wesvista makes a great point, who is Google to determine what's excessive and what isn't? Google specifically states that your site may see a drop in ranking if you obtain links in an effort to manipulate search results. This doesn't state that if you get too many links in a day that they will penalize you. In fact, that doesn't even remotely imply that. It happens all the time, something gains popularity or success "overnight", if this happens to your site, and suddenly you get a huge number of backlinks, that's fine. If Google were going to penalize you for that, then they would have to penalize themselves as well. When they launched Chrome, millions of links sprang up overnight to the download page. The programmers are aware that this does happen, and they have adjusted the algorithm to support this occurrence. Not only that, but there are billions of sites on the Internet, and Google doesn't crawl every site every day, so there may be a time when it crawls through a number of sites that have your links attached to them, why would they penalize you because they were slow to get around to it? That just doesn't make sense. The PR drop can be attributed to any number of factors, which is why you shouldn't stress out about it.
It's simple... if today your site has 0-2 links and suddenly tomorrow it has 2000 links then something is wrong. Google alarms will ring and they will investigate your site to see what's going on. It will not be automatically penalized (because sometimes it may be normal to get thousands of links, ie. if you post something very useful). The web spam team will investigate your site to see if it is something normal or spamming. In the second case your site will be penalized. It is also important who links to you and who do you link to. If your site is about Nokia mobile phones and it links to sites about Mexican food, it something very unrelated and they will consider it as spam.
This question has been asked hundreds of times before, check the search feature of this forum. And no, I don't believe they do. If they did then every website that hits the front page of Digg.com would be penalized. Obviously that is not the case.
Well, we need to define what "excessive" really is and how google perceives it, 100 links a day? 500? or even a thousand? Here, you might want to read this: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356
who is Google to determine what's excessive and what isn't? well, it's their website, they'll decide. And in my opinion, they do - they know what's a natural link-building pattern and what isn't. They don't give a flying monkey's bum for 'webmasters' - they exist for searchers, their commitment is to provide relevant results for searchers - that's how they got to be the no 1 search negine. Something about your site makes your site look less relevant than other results? - they will downgrade it - probably just by ignoring the suspicious links.
"Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging ("Link to me and I'll link to you.")" It doesn't say anything about gathering too many links in a day. There are many ways to obtain links, and as I stated before, if your site becomes popular overnight, and you get thousands of links to you, that's legitimate. You should not be penalized for being popular, that makes no sense. If you are getting links in a effort to game the system, which we are all guilty of, that will get you your penalty.
i more or less think Google has some algo somewhere which notes growth or rate of linking/links and that if somehow there is something out of the 'ordinary' for their model of the internet universe etc it gets called to their attention and they determine or could determine that there is some form of manipulation going on, either due to the nature of the neighborhood or the quality and quantity of the sites linking or the relevance too. they are awfully smart about all this, so yes they can and do penalize, and also weight the penalty depending on the degree of 'infraction' of their guidelines. but I am supposing from my readings and drawing inferences! that's what they have a page about "link schemes" and they try to control those...we all know that. what we may not know is the actual threshold or penalty.