Hello; I'm getting 2 different stories on backlinks. 1) Slowly get backlinks or google willhurt my rankings. 2) links to you can't hurt you. Just outgoing links can hurt. Can these both be true? My blackhat competition can just linkfarm me and get me kicked from google? Should I really go slowly on directory lists?
And you'll probably still get 2 answers every time the issue comes up Getting too many links too fast will definitely get you "sandbox'ed" meaning even if your pages show as indexed, they never will return in serps. If you can spot your competition's site early enough in the grwoth phase and have the resources to get them tons of incoming links overnight, then yeah you can hurt them. Doing it to a well established site is a lot harder.
That's interesting. I went down a directory list about a week ago with 175 directories. I'll probably get listed on half and over a stretch of a month. Do I need to be worried or are we talking thousands of links instantly that hurts?
For new sites? Only on subdomains. For existing sites that are 6-18 months old and not in the sandbox but with serps in the 20th-100th range for my target keywords I have had them thrown out with overly aggressive link building. <edit> Actually, that's not quite true. I have many sites that get traffic from google that are new and the traffic comes to the internal pages which have no external links pointing to them at all. All the link building was to the homepage and it was only about a dozen strong links. </edit>