How fast is too fast in building quality links?

[GoogleMcDougald]

So I'm working on a brand new project, and want to go after my competition rather aggressively. I have a long list of industry resources, including blogs, articles and directories, and several news/media/press release type sites that I could have link to me in a very short amount of time.

How fast is too fast? Is there a penalty for getting links too fast if they are all legit?

[danatanseo]

This is a very subjective situation I think. If you had an older, very large, well-established site, the rate at which links are acquired might have a history. As with anything, there are times when things might have peaks and valleys. For example, if you are Coca-Cola and you release a new product, you might see a huge jump in the number of inbound links as the news breaks, and then things will setlle back down to normal. Google understands that this type of thing is normal.

I'd take a look at the linking profiles, site-size and domain age of your competitors. Since your site sounds like it will be a brand new one, Barn-burning your way past your competitors in terms of inbound links in the first week is probably going to raise Googlebot's eyebrows a bit.

However, I have to (as always) throw in the caveat that no one, not me, nor anyone here, can predict what Google will or won't like, rank or penalize.

Look at the profiles of your competitors, if at most they are adding a link or two a day, then stay within that. But of course, ideally, the links are coming because you've built a better site than your competitors and people just are naturally wanting to link to you (I know, I know....in a perfect world....)

Trust your gut. If you are going agreesively after links and have to ask yourself "Is this too many too fast?"...then it probably is.