A WebmasterWorld thread has an SEO asking, what is the recommendation in terms of how many links you should build, in order not to trigger some type of red flag with Google where you trip the "link velocity" threshold.
Fun question but the truth is, there is no such number of threshold.
Think about it for a minute.
There are new sites that launch all the time that get tons of outstanding press, which leads to tons of outstanding links.
Now if Google sees all those links and notices also a huge spike in news and social activity around the site, I suspect they know these links (the majority of them) are legit. If all is quiet on the news front and there is very little social activity, I assume that would raise a red flag.
So sites can get huge surges in links, especially if they make it to the news or get hot socially but if not, be careful.
About two years ago, we wrote about a case study of a new site getting too many links too fast and showed how there was a surge in traffic, which soon died out.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Image credit to BigStockPhoto for links image
