Is there any Penalty for building in bound inks too quickly?

[Ron_McCabe]

I was speaking with someone today who was spreading out their link building because they were afraid that getting too many too quickly would incur penalties from Google and Bing.  Is this a real thing?  I have always been under the impression that if they are high quality links and directories that there was no limit to how many you could add other than the limited availability of the high quality links and directories themselves. I would appreciate some input on this.

[Eavesy]

Building too many directory links could definitely get you penalised, even if you build them up gradually. If the links are organic like from a decent linkbait or infographic then you will probably be OK, in fact you will probably see a nice boost in your rankings after about 3-4 weeks in my experience.

[gazzerman1]

Building links in high quality directories is not natural and should be nofollowed as you are building them yourself.

Having a great news story and lots of people picking it up and linking to you as a result will not end in a penalty even if it is millions of links.

But batches of links that Google already deems as average quality or maybe even low quality will trigger an alert rather quickly.

If you are going to go down the route you are going, then the only way you will get away with it is with a large diversity of  themes. If they are all directories and articles the pattern will be very clear even for a robot and will trip a filter or even a penalty.

[AlanMosley]

You could raise suspicion, but some sites go viral and build links naturally very quickly.

what I would suggest is that if you are building links quickly, they are probably crappy links. If you can get a link easily its probably worthless.

[MarieHaynes]

I think that there's a common belief that if a site suddenly got an influx of links that it could trigger a manual review.  But I'm not sure that I agree.  Someone asked John Mueller about this in a hangout.  It's at about 41:39: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uj1PNkDtYKs&feature=c4-overview&list=UUthrUiuJUtFSXBUp48D8bAA

He mentioned that there are lots of reasons for a site to suddenly attract a large number of links so that really isn't something to worry about.

I think that there's absolutely nothing to worry about if a site is attracting links in large amounts and rapidly.  But, if you are building them, then I would argue that they're unnatural.  Sure, there are some directories that are probably acceptable to Google.  But, if you're saying that you're creating links in a large enough scale that it could look suspicious then they're probably bad links that are going to affect you the next time that Penguin refreshes.  This includes widescale guest posting as well.  Just throwing that out there as some people are still under the impression that they can write hundreds of articles and get them posted on other people's sites and call that "White hat content marketing".

I personally don't think that the creation of a large number of links all at once would open a site up for a manual review as I can't see how that would scale.  But, I could be wrong.  I don't think anyone really knows the answer to that question.

[JaneCopland]

As Marie and Gary have said, there are a lot of legitimate reasons why a site would acquire a high number of new inbound links naturally. Even if those sorts of links prompted Google to manually have a look at the backlink profile, this sort of activity isn't going to hurt.

What Google is looking for with backlink acquisition is unnatural patterns, so if you were to add 1,000 links to a backlink profile of (say) 1,500 links, with no discernible media attention, content creation or seasonality, you'd be breaking a pattern of link acquisition (or the lack thereof) and possibly trigger attention. Google is incredibly good at pattern recognition, for obvious reasons. If a pattern changes, there has to be a reason for the change. If they determine that the change was manipulative an unnatural, that's where you run into trouble.

Echoing what others have said about link building using directories - I can't endorse that as a link building tactic at all. Get listed where appropriate for reasons other than SEO (are you a local hairdresser in Everett, WA? Getting listed on a site about service providers in Everett is absolutely fine). The sort of directory-based link building that was common and fairly useful for "volume" in ~2009 is no longer a good idea. You'll show up on sites like these without effort (people seeking to fill out directories they run), and shouldn't worry too much about those sorts of links, but it's not advisable to seek them yourself.