Is there an upper bound on the number of links an url might get in a day?

[snetface]

There are link spammers and programs like GSA and others, that automate linkbuilding, and I was wondering if anybody ever had a penalty because a page on his site is getting too many references (links).

I am not talking about spamming here. So provided that the links are coming from relevant, unique sources, but you do an over excessive campaign, and you seem to be getting too many backlinks, can it negatively affect SEO?

Alternatively: is there an upper bound on the number of links you try to build in a day when you are doing linkbuilding?

[gazzerman1]

Google have their own internal metrics about what they feel to be natural or not. It is very popular for sites these days to have an article on it go viral and seem to be an unusual pattern. They are prepared for that, if the pattern looks unnatural then it will be easy for a robot to detect. If that pattern is then replicated multiple times for multiple pieces it becomes very suspect.

If you do not have a shady past, ie, recovered penguin site, or lots of dodgy links already then its highly unlikely to trigger anything even if the links were in the tens of thousands. If its natural it will be easy to observe even by a robot.

There is no upper limit to something going viral.

Worst case scenario if it points to an internal page, Google's John Mueller says you can simply 404 the page and all links pointing to that page will simply not count any more. Although if affected by a penalty as a result will still be a long painful task for recovery as you will need to wait for the algorithm to refresh to be re-included. But its more likely that the single page of content would be hit by penguin rather than the whole site anyway.