I am currently researching sites to link to and avoiding any 'link exchange' sites. Therefore this is taking up some considerable amount of time. I will be contacting over 100-200 websites initially. My question is should I contact them in stages of say 20 at a time wait a couple of weeks then contact another 20 and so on. And hope I get a 10 to 20% of these sites linking back on each occasion. Do Google in particular frown upon a site getting a load of links in one surge or does this not matter. One Surge vs. Trickle which is more beneficial?
right you are there mrsolutions...links will come naturally without you knowing it specially if your site gave valuable and quality contents...just improve your link popularity and use some of your keywords as your anchor text but avoid keyword stuffing and that will help you rank well...and one-way linking is great rather than reciprocal linking...though it is good to link exchange with related, quality and trusted sites....
I agree. Too easy to knock out your competition and would encourage sabbotage spamming. I'm really starting to believe that there is nothing inbound links can do to hurt you. You can't control who links to you, at worst they get devalued. Anyone have any exaples of how I may be wrong/stupid or both?
inbound links can't hurt your websites but consider that too many links, google will consider spam i'm not talking about 100-200 link ... but 1000-2000 hope this is usefull
few hundred links shouldn't be a problem but thousands can throw up a flag especially if your site is fairly new without very many inbound links right now.
100-200 * 20% = 20-40 sites linking to yours = no penalty at all, even if you get them in one day, especially when you consider googlebot still has to crawl the sites, which might take a few days.
don't worry about inbound links. Like everyone has already said, you can't control who links to you! Out of your hands = no need to worry
Just remember, if you are reciprocating, make sure you dont get cast into a bad neighberhood by google.
not to mention you could do some sort of viral marketing that really catches on - all of a sudden thousands of people start linking to you...will google penalize you for being successful? I think worst case is they are devalued.
If you submit to 200 sites, you might get 10-20 successful exchanges, which is fine. I have to disagree with everyone above in that a couple of thousand low quality non-natural looking links built over say a month can cause major and long term damage to a new site. If your site is established, it should be ok. Whatever you believe, I think everyone agrees that it's best to not leave a pattern. One of the nice thing about link baiting is there is no pattern. If you build 200 link exchanges all with the same link text and description around the link, that's a pretty easy pattern to detect. Because of this, I won't sit down for an afternoon and do just link exchanges. I'll submit 10 link exchanges. Then submit to 10 free directories. Then a couple of paid directories. Then post a few links on the forums. Then post a few comments on some interesting blogs. Then write a bit of new content for the site and tweak some meta tags. This looks more natural than a whole pile of directory links all appearing in one go. It's also less boring for you.
i had a site once in which i started building links maybe 50-100 links a day. it was a 1 week old when started my campaign. to make it short, i never had any problems with building many links too soon.
Anyways, think about it: What if Google made a new site on a new domain for a new service? I'm sure they'd get thousands of links fast. I'm also sure they wouldnt be devalued, because the links don't LOOK like directories, link exchange, etc.
For 20 sites you can do all in one shot. Anyway you are not going to get backlinks from all of them. I think you should increase the count.
In your case, that ammount of links will never put you in trouble. Imagine a site that get digged, slashdotted, or reviewed in a big blog? It will get lots of new backlinks. I would be more wary of thousands of non-related, low pr, and bad neighborhood links, not manual ones.
Exactly. If Google released a new service, webmasters big and small will blog about it and it will build links super quick. But there will be a decent amount of links on decent sites, to offset all the links on rubbish sites. There will only be a handful of directory links, and no recips. The anchor text will mostly be "google xxxxxxxx", but also a lot of variation. And the link on Google.com would help a bit too Whole different ball game to the link building we are talking about here.
Target relevance, avoid bad neighborhood sites while doing link exchange with them and submit as many as you can. If you play fairly then there is no one to stop you.