Nov 22, 2010 Posted in Marketing Ideas

No Such Thing as Building Links Too Fast

At a very high level, the Google robot looks at two aspects of your website when determining where to rank it. The first is your on-site content. This includes how your site is structured and the content (words, audio, pictures and videos) that your site contains.

The second aspect that Google looks at is your in-bound links. When other sites link to your site Google sees it as a ‘vote of confidence’ and the more sites you get, the better your ranking will be. Of course, as with all things related to Google, it isn’t that easy. Where those links are coming from and how other sites link to you are also important. The more important (or higher authority) the site that is linking to you is, the more valuable that link will be.

This is all basic search engine optimization stuff but important to review in light of today’s discussion. What I do want to talk about is linking strategy. Of course, given the information above, it stands to reason that if you get as many links as possible from as many sites as possible your search rankings will improve. That only makes sense.

However, many SEO experts are incredibly paranoid about getting links. They believe that getting too many links too fast will land you in the infamous Google sandbox, your site will get de-index and you’ll never receive another visitor through Google’s organic search results.

Here is why I believe that all of this is hogwash and why you can never build links too fast. That isn’t to say that you should use stupid tactics like link farms and free for all listing sites but you should never be worried about other sites linking to you. Why? Because who links to you is beyond your control. I can’t stop a porn site from linking to my blog anymore than I can stop the rain from falling during the winters in Vancouver. I can control who I link to but I can’t control who links to me.

And Google knows this. Why is this so important? Because if a site could get penalized for what other sites link to it and if I wasn’t such a nice guy, I would spam all of my competitors’ sites. I’d place links to their sites from all these shady sources and they would get de-indexed. Of course, it doesn’t work that way.

All of those links would likely be discounted but it is hard to imagine that Google would destroy a site because of something that is clearly beyond a webmaster’s control AND can be so easily gamed. Same thing goes for duplicate content but that is another discussion.

At the end of the day, inbound links is one of the main criteria that Google looks at when rating your site. I’m not suggesting that you spam to get as many links as possible but I am saying that you shouldn’t worry about getting too many links too quickly.

These are called viral campaigns (people pass around great content) and the number of links to a site increases immediately. This the nature of good marketing on the web and Google expects this to happen. They are not going to penalize you for it.