Does it affect SEO of how quickly you get in-bound links?

[findachristianjob]

We have undertaken a very aggressive in-bound linking campaign.  I have a whole team of people working to get in-bound links to our site.  But I dont want to cause any red flags to the search engines on how quickly we get all of these in-bound links.  Will they notice or flag our site if they see a quick rise of in-bound links?

Thanks.

[RyanKent]

I agree with you Asim.

An example I recall was where an existing site for a mining company gained a lot of links and attention after a mining accident. Search engines can identify when there is major news on a topic and an increase in related links.

[asimahme]

I think there are two sides to this argument,

I agree with everyone's response on this thread, but I think you also got to keep in mind that an article has a potential to go viral (Top Digg page, Top Social Bookmark Page, Top for Content Syndication Partner), and possibly gain 100+ links in a week.

Now from my understanding and I could be wrong, but if an article recieves 100+ links, but the anchor text is fairly different or is a brand name anchor text and if majority of the links are from blogs or websites that are updated frequently with fresh content, than I don't think your website would get the red flag.

Google understands an article has potential on going viral and attracting 100+ links in a week, I don't think they will penalize you for creating viral content.

However I agree with what Ryan said, if they look unnatural meaning if they all have the same anchor text and seem manipulated than I can see that being a problem and being flagged.

[RyanKent]

Will they notice or flag our site if they see a quick rise of in-bound links?

If you get too many links, too fast, then yes.

How many is too many? Well like the rest of SEO metrics, it's complicated. I searched and found many articles discussing this topic but I prefer not to share unless I find a Matt Cutts video or a source I can trust. In short, it's important for the links to look completely natural.

When links are built voluntarily, they have a pattern to them. When your site which has existing for 2 years suddenly receives 100+ links in a week, especially when they all have perfect link text, that will look quite unnatural.

[DonnieCooper]

Hey Justin, the rate at which you acquire new inbound links can matter.

This whiteboard wednesday video about link growth patterns, should be enough to get your team thinking about how to become a resource and naturally attract links in an ongoing fashion, as opposed to running a temporary link building campaign or two.

Even though it's a bit old, this 2009 link building webinar is great too.

PS. Don't forget tomorrow's link building webinar on SEOmoz

[john4math]

One post I came across that could be of interest here regarding Bing.  It's a little old, but probably still accurate.  It sounds like you could get flagged by them, but only if the number of inbound links suddenly increases by orders of magnitude in a short period of time.  Here is the relevant part of the article:

Going unnatural

So what does it mean to go unnatural? It means you're trying to fake out the search engines, to try to earn a higher ranking that the quality of your site's content dictates as natural through manipulation of search engine ranking algorithms. This chicanery can range from relatively benign but useless efforts to overly aggressive promotion to outright fraud. And as the major search engine bots are continually crawling the entire Web, we see what is being done, the relationships between linked sites, the changes to links over time, which sites link to one another, and so much more, we account for these cunning behaviors in our indexing values applied to those pages.

Examples of potentially conspiratorial hocus-pocus that might be perceived as unnatural and warrant a closer review by search engine staff include but are not limited to:

• The number of inbound links suddenly increases by orders of magnitude in a short period of time
• Many inbound links coming from irrelevant blog comments and/or from unrelated sites
• Using hidden links in your pages
• Receiving inbound links from paid link farms, link exchanges, or known "bad neighborhoods" on the Web
• Linking out to known web spam sites