Feb 20th, 2007
Too Many Links?
A common quesiton I receive from prospective clients is, “Can I get too many links to my site?” or “Will the search engines penalize me if I get too many links too quickly?”
The answer to the first of these questions is no. You can’t have too many links to your site. The more links you have the better, and the better the links the better off you are. I have heard that you can get penalized by being linked to from bad link farms (here the only purpose of the websites are link building), but I highly doubt that you could be penalized too harshly for such an act because otherwise competitors could get links in these bad link farms for their competition and have them penalized (sounds like a good idea eh? well, don’t do it).
The answer to the second question is yes. You can get too many links too quickly and be penalized for it in all of the major search engines. The real question here then is how many links can you get within a certain period of time without being penalized? I don’t beleive the answer to that question will ever be known because of the potential problems that could cause. I’m also guessing that it wouldn’t be the same amount for every site on the web because there are plenty of major sites that get thousands of links a day and other smaller sites that get zero to a few a month.
My recommendation would be to make it a continual process so that you never have a huge surge of links to your site, but instead feels like natural growth.
Yeah, it’s tough to get too much of a good thing (in this case, links). But it seems like if you get a lot of crappy links, er, low quality links too quickly, it could have a negative effect. Especially if all your links use the same keyword text or if it’s all links coming from the same link farm or some other similar scheme to trick the search engines. It seems like sites that get a lot of viral links or links from the press, etc, don’t see the same kind of penalty as getting a bunch of junky directory links. So aim for quality over quantity when it comes to links.