When I first got into SEO, i thought that building too many links too fast could hurt you with Google. Then someone explained to me that it can never hurt you, but it can not be as powerful because Google catches. But they said that it cannot hurt you, as competition could do this to each other to get each others site's punished. What is the truth on this? I've submitted maybe 20 articles for a site in the last 1.5 months. During googles algo change on OCt 31st, I lost my top ten rankings and went back to 55. I then was re-ranked and I am now back in the top ten, but -- not quite where I was. Should I cool off for a while?
Well you can if you build at an unrealistic rate that you don't sustain. If you build 500 links in one day, then 3 a week for the next month, Google will know what's up. There is no right or wrong number, just build evenly.
@ Gallito - Yeah I agree that you should try to keep you link building steady, but I don't think google will punish you, you could for example just have a really viral page which gets loads of links within a couple of days. You also need to take into the account that google won't get all of the links at once. I think you should go for no more than 25 links per day (spread over your site) so 1 link per page max per day.
Gallito is right. There is no minimum or maximum links you can build per day. It is natural that a new site get lot of links initially and then slowly reducing the rate of incoming links. (Think of a celebrity launching his/her personal site) But if you have totally irregular link building pattern it can affect. Moreover if all the links are coming from a certain type of sites this can also get your site flagged. Say, you get 500 directory links week. Next few weeks no links to your site. After 2 months or so, if you again build 500 links to your site in a week using social bookmarking, this definitely not natural and hurt.
Gallito's explanation is by far the most pertinent. Sustained and gradual 'natural' link building will result in some nice even rankings. If you go completely link building mad, it's likely to result in damaged rankings.
You need to keep it fairly consistent... at least in the beginning. If your site is new Google knows that 500 sites are not going to link to you out of nowhere in one day. But if you have a huge established popular site then 500 links in a day isn't necessarily out of the question.
There's no problem if the average rate is consistent and it don't hurt any rankings,search engine positions.
Ok I disagree with many of the sentiments here against gaining many backlinks in a sporadic fashion. Let me explain; if you have written something truly newsworthy on a new blog and it manages to get picked up by other big bloggers, digg, news sites etc then you could end up with thousands of link very quickly. Then, later on, you write less juicy posts and receive very few natural links back to your site. Is this wrong? Is this bad? No and why would Google think so. It all depends on the type of link and where it comes from. If the links are mainly in the editorial content of other sites then it's all good and if those sites happen to be authorities then my bet is that the large number of links you quickly gained is only ever going to help you. But, on the other hand if you build a tonne of directory links and comment on hundreds of blogs then I would say this does look unnatural and Google could disregard some of the links but I don't think it will harm your future potential rankings. Otherwise a big company could flatten a newcomer to a niche by building loads of poor quality links to a site and watch as it gets penalised. No way would Google allow this. Just my two cents, don't shoot me down too bad
I would say that it depends on the niche, take for example the loans niche, the #1 site ranking site has a couple of million backlinks, so what hints do you get from that !
I think it can have a bad affect. I got this guy's article published in a couple very nice and relevant online magazines. A week after, he was being linked to from tons of blogs because of what they read on the magazine. His PR dropped to 0 and he has around 700 links....
I also heard that building links in a steady way is the best way to do it But if this is true what you're saying then someone else could kill your website by just submitting links
It does NOT hurt rankings. Don't listen to anyone who says otherwise. I will build 1,000 backlinks in a day for a certain page in a website, and Google shows me love within 1-3 days. On one occasion less than 24 hours. And that's not even taking into effect that I do this on multiple pages at some times, so really one domain is getting a few thousand backlinks in a small amount of time. You have nothing to worry about.
In my opinion: Realistically you can't build links too fast without a program. Generally speaking people quit after just 4 hours of grinding. 8 hours of linkbuilding is too much.
IF do manually BL from article sub, Forum sig, directory sub etc will not cause any problem. But if use any tool to do it and submity 100 in a day google will punish