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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?

So I have a couple 3 year old projects I left intact for the last 2 years. Lately I tried to revigorate them. I started to build links to pages that used to be in Google top ten, but the more links I build, the more I lose out on traffic. The main keywords stay around the same position, I suppose the loss in appearances and traffic that can be seen in webmaster tools is mainly due to long tails I do not check the rankings for. I want to ask you guys if anybody have experienced similar data? I suppose it might be due to the exact anchor tags that I have used 3 years ago, so I already started removing those to see if it has a positive effect. I wanted to ask you, maybe somebody has experienced the same and already knows the reason and a solution for this phenomenon?

I know generally it's not a good idea posting project urls, however this time I'll break the rule as I could really use some genuine ideas: I just can't explain my rankings. So I created a small site, branded term, english language, I will use my British ranking data, you can use justproxy.co.uk to verify if you'd like. Site is 2 years old. My main keyword is Breast Actives, however my I describe the strangest phenomenon after the bullets. Site: http://buybreastactives.info So the point is: I did a little keyword stuffing back in the days, but removed it, took a safe middle density (analyzed the first rankers keyword usage). I've been looking at competitors backlink profiles comparing them to mine. The growth rates are similar. I have a little lower Domain and Page authority than the first few sites, but not that lower. Backlink quantity is somewhat similar to first 20, yet still I am ranking somewhere way beyond 200. I am not expecting a first place with a "somewhat similar" profile, but my bet is I should be at least in top 50. The only technique that worked was regular posting, I brought up the site into top 70, but as the site is really focused on a particular product, and the site's brewity suffered the price of posting semi-related articles, so I stopped. Rank out beyond 200. Another intresting aspect I cannot get my head around is that for "breast actives reviews" I have  a dedicated page buybreastactives.info/real-customer-reviews, with some keyword usage, and another page buybreastactives.info/worldwide is ranking for it (around 80-90), but it does not use this keyword at all. So if you have some time to give it a glance I would be greatful for some thoughts. EDIT: Before penguin around 2012 dec site was in top 10 for nearly all terms targetted, with the stuffed keywords.