Build Links Fast! There Is No Penalty In Getting Many Links Quickly

Now just before I said that, I am already wearing my bulletproof vest armor and mask with my forcefield on just in case people slam me right away without reading.

Links help in ranking

Here are a few SEO fundamentals that are considered SEO facts already my a majority number of people in the SEO industry.

1. Incoming links to your website increase ranking. They are like votes of authority, trust, credibility.


2. Google and many of the other search engines are against artificial link building. This is trying to influence search engines by creating so many links yourself trying to pretend many people like your site, thus linking to you.

Thus any form or kind of way you are trying to influence ranking artificially, like buying links only for the purpose of having a link for search engine ranking, or participating in various types of automated link exchanging and farming are frowned upon by search engines. And Google and other search engines are getting better and better in detecting these artificial link building activities.

Getting too many links too fast is bad!

Ok now I am contradicting my own title of the blog post. But this is known by many SEO experts already. If you build links so fast on a new page, or worst on a new site, and add tons of them in a short period of time, this spells ranking disaster and can get your site into penalty zone if you don't get kicked out right away.

I have seen more and more people experience this when they have a site on page 1 ranking at number 10, then suddenly adds so many links and after two days, they are found beyond the 100 rank. Which is not impossible to fix by the way, you can still crawl your way back up if ever you did experience this.

But massive link building can still be done quickly without getting any penalty!

This actually happens everyday. I have seen this happen many times in the past. But I don't memorize each example so I will just use a very recent one.

The China Earthquake

Now before I continue with this blog post, I'd like to take a break from your train of thought for just a couple of minutes and say a little prayer regardless of your religion and pray that there may be more survivors found in the rubbles of the recent earthquake last Monday at 8:00pm. And for the survivors, let's pray that the affected families be able to recover well from this disaster. It is believed that there are nearly 10,000 deaths due to the earthquake from the intensity 7.9 earthquake. We would like to express our deepest condolences to all the families that were affected by the earthquake. If you wish to contribute and help out in the relief fund, and is not sure where to go to, I always trust the Red Cross than any other website online as there are also scammers online that it is hard to detect who are the real and fake relief entities.

This sad event happened on Monday evening (China Time) which was two days ago. As of current press time, searching from the US on Google.com page 1 shows 4 pages that have so many links right away within 2 days.

Number 3 Result on Google for China Earthquake - CNN.com



CNN is showing that their article about the China Earthquake now has 811 links all acquired in 2 days.

Number 5 Result on Google for China Earthquake is Yahoo News



Yahoo's syndicated news from Associated Press gathers 321 links in 2 days.

Number 7 Result goes to technology blogger Robert Scoble on the popular Scobleizer blog



The techblogger already with a large fan base gets 560 links in two days after the earthquake.

Number 8 goes to the US Geological Survey that records almost any earthquake and volcanic activity world wide.



The high authoritative and very informative site of the US government gets 539 links easily in 2 days.

All of these sites gathered so many links in a very short period of time, and yet they are not beyond page 10. I know many of you may argue these are highly authoritative sites so they can get away with it, and I have seen this effect in the past already with Hurricane Katrina, San Diego's Wild Fires, Indonesia's Tsunami. This can build links to many news sites that are already popular with high Google PageRank. But that does not mean it cannot happen to a site that is unknown.

I have seen this happen to many sites but it is hard to remember a specific example and the one that I can quickly remember is Ms Dewey. Today Ms Dewey has 40k+ links but when the site first came out in 2006, she was totally unknown. The site came out of nowhere and their links just exponentially increased in a short period of time. Where they banned? Nope, their content was purely viral and links were all natural.

Now two words I want you to focus on in the previous sentence: Natural and Viral.

Going Natural

I believe natural links and artificial links is not that hard to be detected by Google. So many factors and patterns to look at. IP addresses, locations, rate of increase, date and time, types of sites, varying link text, deep linking and a lot more. The more natural it looks, the better.

Go Viral

I guess you have heard this word over and over again, viral marketing, viral video, viral media but this is actually an old concept even before the Internet went commercial. The term word-of-mouth is already talking about viral marketing. The more viral it is, the more it spreads, and serves as better link baits. Thus making more natural links.

To end this blog post and sum it up into 1 sentence, that sentence would be: Building links so fast and so many is ok as long as your links are all natural.

And a few more things for you to think about...

• Viral content may not be applicable to every industry. It will all depend on your advertising creativeness. We go back to content is king, whatever the content form is, text, photos, videos, applications, etc. How can you apply this to your industry?


• SEO is not all about link building and it is not all about link numbers but also link quality and PageRank. With earthquake example I had, as of current press time, CNN, Yahoo News, USGS and Scobleizer were on page 1. But the number 1 organic result a blog post that gathered only 59 links.

Note: All the number of links used in this blog post are based on Yahoo's Site Explorer report on links. This may not be an exact number, but is currently the more complete you can get publicly and I used this on all websites to be consistent with the number comparisons.