It is an all too common question asked by new internet marketers in forums all over the internet. How many links per day is safe to avoid the Google sandbox? Whether or not this sandbox exists is another question. Many sagely so called experts will advise ridiculous figures like 10 per day or 5 per day for 3 months, then double it. They dish out this advice like doctors dish out medicine. Take 2 every 4 hours until the link blisters clears up.
As you may have guessed, my opinion is that there is no real limit. Let us put out logic hats on and see why. A new website could be launched with a fantastically informative article that is picked up on by bloggers and webmasters and linked to all over the internet. The result could be hundreds of thousands of links within a few days of the sites launch. That is how fast popular material can spread on the internet. Why on earth would Google want to punish this site, surely it is in Google’s interests to encourage this type of website? I firmly believe that a rush of links to your new website will not result in any penalties.
Once again, internet experts will say that such a rush of links so early in a websites life is not natural. My answer to them would be that there is no natural pattern to link building. Sites can go for months without getting any links, and then suddenly get thousands, then return to getting none again. What is unnatural is getting a consistent amount of links every day. In fact, building a set amount of links every day is probably the most unnatural behaviour going.
My advice would be to promote your website as much as possible. If you have unlimited time and resources, then hit the promotion hard. If you only have an hour per week, then spend an hour per week building links. Whatever you do, do not slow down just because a self proclaimed internet marketing guru told you to.
Finally, I would also like to point out that links cannot hurt your website. If they could, then we could focus our efforts on building these harmful links to our competitors websites until they went out of business. This kind of situation would be counterproductive and something that any search engine would never want to encourage. So stop reading internet forums and listening to gurus, and focus all your efforts on building a successful website.
