I'm wondering what you guys do when you're creating a new site completely from scratch. From my experience MSN and Yahoo don't really seem to care how quickly you get new links (this being especially true in the case of MSN). Google, however, seems to punish (or atleast filter) sites that get many links in a short period of time. It seems the main tactics for link building publicly discussed on the forums are: Directory Submissions Article Submissions Requesting Links from Similar Sites (feel free to fill in the blanks i'm leaving out but let's try to stay away from purchased links, just for simplification of this discussion) When implementing the above on a new site, what pace do you go at? Assume the site was registered yesterday, and the domain has just propogated. You upload a home page and 20 content pages you had prepared in advance, and the site is good to go (but not indexed yet). Do you slowly increase the number of links you build each day? (e.g. 1 the first day, 2 the second, 3 the third, etc?) Or do you just get as many as quickly as possible? Or do you just go 20 directory submissions a day for a month? I'm very interested to hear the tactics of the members here. I was just in the process of setting up 10 completely unique sites with similar amounts of content and targetting keywords with about the same level of competition. My idea is then to test different speeds of link building and seeing how the results differ. This experiment would of course have some obvious issues (e.g. hard to find terms different terms that are equally competitive, directory submissions can take days to be approved, etc). So I guess the main questions of the thread are: 1. What do you think of the experiment? Any suggestions or input to improve it before I start? 2. 3. Do you have any other suggestions for time-efficient and free link building techniques i left out?
Generally speaking, I try to automate as much of the link-building process as possible, and don't worry too much about the rate at which they're built. I use a service called Article Marketer for article submission, which can provide a very large number of backlinks very quickly. I also use a program called SEO Elite, which does a lot of the "grunt work" related to contacting other sites and requesting backlinks or link exchanges. I've never had any issues with penalties for building links too quickly (or at least not that I know of ), and I think the quality of your links is probably much more important than the number or how fast they're created. HTH, Sam