Can you get penalized for increasing too quickly the number of links to your website? ie, via submitting to too many directories, submitting too many articles...
Its not really a penalty persay. Its more like if you go out and buy 1,000 links not all of them will index at the same time. A large number of them will of course, but the search engines might not index some of them for your site because of relevancy for a few weeks, months or even years. Slow and steady always wins the race
No way they give you penatly Google is playing some bad games to increase adwords sales ,will not lastlong
I think that this is a myth, although for new sites they do get sandboxed. If you do drop out of the SERPS after ranking for them early on, just keep building links at a steady rate, you will soon get out. Certain sites will get splurges of links, for example when they get dug etc, so i wouldn't worry about it too much.