Hi, I'm talking to a potential client. He has been talking to another SEO firm. The clients site is www.the-premier-group.org.uk . The other company have said that they will create over 500 links immediately to the site. I've advised the client that this could be dangerous as it could cause an un-nateral link pattern which may get the site penalised. He also has no idea where the links will come from. I've said that we will gradually build up his link count as well as doing on-page optimisation. Am i right in thinking that gaining these links to quickly could get the site penalised?
Not sure and i think only google engineers can answer this but yes any unnatural activity will be very risky and getting 500 links immediately to site may get you in problem unless they keep getting links at the same rate and maintain that rate which is almost impossible. So it is VERY risky
500 instantly does seem unnatural, I don't think even the best sites get that many when they first start.
/\ not quite so sure though..... a "normal" pattern for acquiring links is fast. When myspace came out, it received 4 inbound links one day, then 50 the next, then 1000, then 15000.... So as you can see... many many sites acquire links very fast because of their popularity. google doesn't punish them.....
Its fine if you keep getting links at that rate as i said before but if you get 500 in one day and no links in other month then you are banned for sure
I don't think the rate of the links is a problem. I have had blog posts that got picked up by Digg and I ended up with several hundreds links in a matter of weeks. That seems like pretty normal behavior for the web. However, if every one of the 500 links is coming from the same ip address, using the same link text, and in the same sentence it probably won't help and might do some harm. Also if the PR of the pages doing the linking has been penalized, it might hurt you as far as PR is concerned. It will still give you some SE traffic and some of the search engines will probably find you a lot faster from the links, but nothing you wouldn't get if you just wait a week or two. Personally, I wouldn't want 500 links unless I knew where they were coming from or it was for a junk domain that I was just experimenting with. If this is a important site, it seems pretty risky--especially when there is very little chance it will benefit them. I can give someone 50,000 links to their page with about 30 seconds worth of work, but it won't do anything useful for them.
And considering how easy it is to point a great number of links at a competitor - can I just "Google Bowl" my competition out of the SERPs? I think not.
Just because you add X number of links to a page in a very brief period of time doesn't mean that they will all get indexed immediately - it may take months to get them all indexed. Some of them may never get indexed. I have yet to see a site get the boot because it got too many links too quickly.
even if you get 500 links for your site, it will NOT have any effect in your link popularity as it will take time for Google to pass on the link benefits. Besides geting too many links to soon with trigger "Burst Link strategy" button.
Can you past the muster if a person looks at your SEO? Can you sustain a fairly even link growth rate (even if that rate gradually slows)? If the answer to both is yes, you are fine. Do you think every new site that has a post hit the front page of Digg or otherwise gets some blog/media attention gets banned?
This is yet another silly webmaster myth. Lets consider the logic: A link to your site is given to you by another webmaster (this serves as a vote) and google has no way of knowing, nor can it assume that you are gaining these in any other way. To penalize you for having a revolutionary new website that everyone wants to link to would go against the whole point of a search engine - to deliver results that are both extremely relevant and of the highest quality. This myth, along with other myths such as reciprocal links are bad (I dont see citysearch and ticketmaster worrying about this issue) are becoming a huge problem in my opinion. As a result, many SEO's are able to dupe unsuspecting webmasters into using their services. It also results in dozens of new threads beginning with "Is this bad"? Use common sense, focus on quality, and most importantly, have patience. If you can do this, then the links will come in NATURALLY.
Agreeeeeeed! These subjects are painful. Common sense perhaps eludes Google at times; thus, the tendency to overreact by webmasters.