I have heard mixed reviews in regards to how fast is too fast in googles eyes when link building. I'd like to hear from someone whom has been penalize for excessive link building in a short time span and what link building method used caused the red flag to go off. Or if anyone knows from experience how fast is to fast when link building I'd like to hear your comments as well.
I link built at a rate of 20-40 per day, then got a directory submission of 150 links overnight. Google penalised me heavily and I practically disapeared from google search, then emerged a week later and carried on improving as normal. So it was temporary for me.
I don't think any person trying to link build by himself can link build to fast. I believe Google will only penalise if you do things which get you like 1000+ links overnight or something and how many people on their own can do that with out the use of spam tools? If I was you I would just keep going on submitting to directories, social bookmark sites, blog commenting etc and you will slowly see your page rank and search engine rankings increase as you get more links to your site.
how fast is too fast depends also from the quality of the links... when a new project send out a press release and get links on big news sites, then it is natural that this site get a lot of links from other sites... at the same time you get a big traffic increase too... google may notice it over the toolbar... and so is it no problem to set many links over night... so long it looks naturally to google... and if a filter matched, set more links... after a few month google remove the filter from your site and you get good positions in the serps... sometimes it's faster to go thru a filter than build links slowly to go into the top10... depends on the keyword...
For a new blog, I would probably do about 5 links a day. And after a month, get 10 links and so forth. Once your blog is indexed by google, then you can add as many links as you want....
Jesus, people give a lot of bad advice on here. Google frowns on directory links, and social bookmarks do not carry much weight (it's too easy to game). What does matter is the quality of links, the number can be anything. If you have a great product or information, it does not matter how fast you build links, or how many you get in a specific time. If you're an affiliate marketing site, you probably don't have a great product or information. More than likely if you're marketing someone else's product, a lot of other people are doing the same exact thing and you will have trouble getting quality links. Which will cause some people to attempt to game the system by creating a lot of links from not so reputable sites. My .02
I agree with PopaWoody about the poor advice thus far, but for different reasons. I'm too busy to space out links I build. I'll do hundreds or sometimes over a thousand within several days. So far I've been doing this for two years and my main "guinea pig" website is doing incredible in SERPs.
Great posts but I agree that quality of links matters and it doesn't matter how many of them. Just think about Bing.com, how many links have they managed to get in the last month (I'm sure huge amount) as they were everywhere... were they banned?
I'll try to follow some of the link building advices here.. Hope to get excellent results in two months time..