Is there such thing as too many backlinks

Here is the situation. I owned a website since 2005 and since them it had for the whole time less than 200 backlinks.

Website was optimized had all the tags H1, H2 and was optimized for specific keyword in extremely competitive industry (insurance) and was gettgin ranked pretty high.

Within last 3 months we have added over 1600 backlinks from all kinds of websites, blogs, press releases, article sites and Directories. All the backlinks were created with proper targeted anchor text.

After doing that the website dropped 10 spots on Google.



Can backlinks damage your website ranking? Does it have anything to do with creating a lot of back links in short amount of time? Is there such thing as too many backlinks?

Any Help from some SEO pros would be greatly appreciated.

 

All the same anchor text? If yes then try varying the anchor text phrases used.

I don't believe in a thing as too many relevant backlinks from harmless sites unless you're talking about google bowling.

Also, it may have to do with the rate at which you acquired these links. Too quick yes too much no. If you got 1600 backlinks in 1 week and the 2nd week you got no new backlinks, that might have an adverse effect.

Were there any reciprocal links?

Also, it takes time. The more a link ages the more valuable it is.

 

Backlinks can damage your site's ranking if they are from a bad neighborhood. This is clear for paid links, which are hunted by Google. But Google and others also try to identify spam sites and backlinks from them can actually reduce your reputation. So one should wisely choose where to try to get backlinks from. Also, backlinks not related to the sites theme (e.g. technical sites if your site is about insurance) and many of them from many different themes may discredit your site.

I have recently written about TrustRank and there is some information in that article on bad neighborhoods taking away trust in your site. You may want to have a glimpse at it...

Rainer

 

It was to fast to be good.

 

Thanks for all the replies. I figured the rate of acquiring links might be a problem. Then how can you compete with sites that have dozens of links. If I keep adding links steadily it would take me years to get even close to some top website that are in my niche. That seems like a not very fair game, when Google owners are saying that they are trying to make it fair for everyone It seems that corporate, commercial websites in most cases are in top positions.

 

It is ok to get a bunch of links at once if they are natural links. This happens all the time on the web, a site makes news and gets tons of natural links. What probably hurt you is that you added a bunch of footer and sidebar links that can be spotted as paid links.

A few obvious "paid links" won't hurt and may even help but don't over do it. The key with paid links is to get natural links in text.

 

I dont believe there is such a thing as too many links or too quickly for that matter because google bots visit diffrent sites at diffrent times so just because you get 1000 today doesnt mean they all will be indexed or indexed at the same time.

 

I wouldn't worry as of yet, seeing as a slight drop in SERPs has a tendency to revive my website with higher rankings in due course.

 

I wouldn't add more than 30-40 links a day.

 

I thought some SEO guy had said something like "a website won't be penalized for incoming links"...

 

You don't need to worry. 1600 links is nothing for an old, established site. If we were talking about 50k, 100k indexed links per month that would be a problem. I bet from your 1600 not even half are indexed by google so far.
Search engines changes their algorithm quite often and this may be the reason why your site went down in serps. Keep working on your site, keep adding a fair amount of backlinks on monthly basis, keep adding unique content and everything will be back to normal...

 

So monthly add less than 1000 links will be good?

 

it does not matter how many links you add...the key is to make it look natural...that is if you add one link a day, its fine but add one link every day...if you add 10000 links a day, thats find but do it every day....consistency is the key

 

Hell no!

You want backlinks, you need backlinks, your site will thrive and survive because of backlinks.

 

Yup, Dude I always have a hundred a day and I don't care even I have too many link.

 

The worst that can happen is some of the links will be devalued, so keep building links. You will probably jump in the SERPs higher than before very soon.

 

I agree. And as long as you don't link to unrelated sites and bad neighborhood you don't have a problem with that.