Challenge: Too Many Links?

I once asked this question to a group of my colleagues that haven?t been in the Internet Marketing industry as long as I have.  I thought I?d throw out the question and see if anyone on the forum answers it correctly.

?Is it ok if a website in a single day or week picks up hundreds, thousands or more in bound links when it has never done so in the past?  Will this have a diverse affect on rankings in Google??

For the first person that answers this correctly, or more accurately; the way I?m looking for it to be answered, I will place one of their links within my signature line once I figure out how to do so.  (Must be non adult, gambling or anything blackhat if Internet Marketing related).

- John F. Jones III

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Ok, I don't want a link in your sig, but I will answer the question

No it is not good to do this, because google logs the link growth of your site and if you gain more links than usual in a time fragment then those links wont give you any ranks for some time. Of course this algorithm is not always working, because a site can have a massive growth in links fast when it is mentioned in social media web sites, so I guess in that case you will get your rankings. From my experience I see a boost in search engine traffic 2 weeks after my site is on Digg or a similar site.

yeah don't do that, there are money blogs about link bombs on the internet.

I remember me free blogs with 100links in the side bar linking to each other. If you use this kind of link schemes you take the  risk to get a penalty

Nikolas & Olaf,

First off, I completely agree that going out and buying 1,000 or 10,000 or even 100 links should be avoided.  I definitely will not ever condone that for the very risk of being suspicious in the eyes of Google.

However there are a few exceptions to getting massive amounts of links pretty quickly and then dying down all of a sudden.  Social Media & blogging are certainly two definite link generating tools if your content is good enough.  Nikolas, do you think that Google won?t raise a flag based off of those links?  Why or why not?

Still haven?t seen specifically what I?m looking for.  I?ll say this though? there IS good reason for a site once in awhile to get a HUGE bump in links and this wouldn?t cause a Google penalty.

Any other takers?  I?ll explain myself on Monday to give others time to chime in.

John F. Jones III

I think there are always exceptions to rules, one of them would be a "viral" incident where your site released a video, or tool that got you a bonanza of links. However, the pattern of that would be extremely different than if you suddenly got a ton of links from 1 or two places(paid for it)

right it's the link scheme and the type of website links to you.

if you have some nice/new item, people will  talk about and also link to your site/blog.

but if you have a lot of link from sites where are already other similar links this could be bad for the owner. Anyway no one will punish you if you get just a lot of links, but ask yourself how often will this happen

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However there are a few exceptions to getting massive amounts of links pretty quickly and then dying down all of a sudden.  Social Media & blogging are certainly two definite link generating tools if your content is good enough.  Nikolas, do you think that Google won?t raise a flag based off of those links?  Why or why not?

I will agree with homesource that there are exceptions to the rules. Google can easily - and automatically - realize if you are getting a massive ammount of links due to social bookmarking web sites, or you are just spamming their index with a bulk purchase of links.

Plus there is a big "identifier" to links that you buy versus the links that are generated naturally. The "natural" links are in relevant content (I mean inside the content) while the majority of the links that you buy are outside of the content and this is something that google can find out since a long time ago.

Plus there is a big "identifier" to links that you buy versus the links that are generated naturally. The "natural" links are in relevant content (I mean inside the content) while the majority of the links that you buy are outside of the content and this is something that google can find out since a long time ago.

So the solution for all directories would be to structure their listings within content provided by the advertiser?  I cannot tell you how many times I've tried explaining this concept to some directory owners that I communicate with.  Many of them don't want to invest in the time or money required to do this and frankly it is unfortunate because most of them don't get much of my business if at all.

I've always said that the two core things you need for successful Internet Marketing is content and links.  These two items in combination regardless if they are surrounded by an H1 tag, in a table, on or off of your site and so on are the core principles needed for a successful game plan.

I've still not seen anyone tell me what circumstances / conditions should be met in order for Google not to hate your sudden flux of links in the thousands though.

John F. Jones III

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You are right. Directories must evolve if they want to be "alive" in the future. Check this article from Tim regarding directory owners.

Personally I am trying to make a new experiment but yet it is too soon to say something about it. But I will let you know when it is ready

Morning Nikolas,

I look forward to experimenting with your experiment.  I'm on the side of Internet Marketing being more of a science then an art therefore testing new things to see how they perform is always something i'm interested in doing.

You are right. Directories must evolve if they want to be "alive" in the future.

I am interested to see if you or anyone else has any "evoloved" directories they would recommend for the real estate industry

Today is Monday and while no one came up with the speicific answer I was looking for I do enjoy the fact that this forum doesn't have a lot of BS commenters that do nothing but say, "Great Post!".

Anyways, Google and other search engines will not penalize a site or even raise a red flag for obtaining hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of links in such a short period IF from what they can see your traffic also increases drastically to meet that sudden flux of links.  In addition to that reasoning I've seen my own clients go over my head once or twice not knowing the risks and purchase hundreds and at one point 10,000 links and their rankings didn't sink like a rock... they didn't help either though.

In fact I'll be bold enough to say that Google and other search engines won't punish you at all for the websites that link to you regardless if there are few or many.  Google has to first establish that you had any involvement in obtaining those links and at best they can assume... but wont.

Think of it this way... if Google penalized for massive amounts of links or even a few links then why would submitting our competitors to thousands of piss poor links not be part of our every day marketing strategy to negatively effect them?

Just some thoughts to ponder for the week going forward.
In fact Google isn't going to penalize a we

Very interesting thread. It kind of makes sense but how would google also track the traffic to your site unless you are running analytics or something?

mrrsx2006,

Google can track traffic in many ways.  Rather or not they utilize all of them I am not sure but here are just a few:
#1.  Google Analytics on your site or those that link to you.
#2.  Alexa data
#3.  Probability Factoring (Google: "Hmm this site is linking to this site right at the top and I know I send this amount of traffic...")
#4.  Bounce Rate - Even w/o Analytics Google can detect a search conducted by a user and then see that user return via the back button to that same search.  Less bounce rate = higher probability the content was good.  While this has nothing to do with the links, if those links help improve rankings while or IF Google is checking the scene out, it can be a good indicator that the site actually deserved the rankings and those links.

Then of course you also have to consider that Google will pay close attention to the quality of the links.  Are they all different in quality, PR, refresh rate, DNS etc.

This isn't all theory by the way.  I cannot recall specifically where I read or heard this but I'm pretty sure Matt Cutts said something a while back about this.  However since I can't seem to find that resource please keep this in your mind as opinion.

I should also point out that if you look at all the google search results, they can gather analytics themselves - as the links aren't real, they're redirects.

Great post I knew He'd like that haha

I wouldn't mind being able to come up with different challenge posts every now and then.  I loved the particular question I presented this time because it is very easy to simply say, "It is bad bad bad!"

Thanks for the compliments aaron_s.

I thought it funny that you would offer a signature link reward but that you don't know how to do it.

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Wait a sec. Google is not penalizing sites for having links. They just ignore the links in their algorithm. Now if you get 10.000 links in one week and google algorithm consider this as spam, you will get the rankings for those links in a long time. This is like penalizing but it is not an actual penalty, and it can cost you more, because if for example you buy today X links from directories or TNX and tomorrow you get 1 good link from an authoritive site in your niche, you may wait months just to get the value of this links in your rankings.

I would think it is best to get your backlinks up gradually and from different sources - directories, blogs, froums, etc.  I would also opt to vary on my anchors from time to time so it would look more natural in the eyes of the SE bots.

Interesting thread you got going here John!  Would love to read more future opinions in here

Google penalize non natural linking so if your 1000 or 10000 links that you got in short time have many things in common regarding (anchor text, web page, placement , sites types) you are more likely to get penalized because to simulate the original natural linking there must be rarely two links alike!

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