Is heavy link building ethical

[Terrapin1]

I was reading in SEOchat that heavy link building is illegal or liable to get you banned by search engines. This includes too many reciprocal or one way link exchanges within a short period of time. Of course, you can't believe everything that you read but I wanted to see what other people's thoughts were on this.

[accurate]

Never belive anything you read or people say to you and you will never do anything wrong or at all.



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[judyo]

This has been mentioned on this forum many times in several different threads. Most believe that you can get penalized from accumulating too many links too quickly. Makes you look like a "link farm" or FFA. Most of us try to get our recips slowly. Some keep it as low as 3 a week. I just try to get a few when I have the time.

[SanDiego]

What about when a new trendy toy or fashion comes out.... the main brand's website probably gets 100's - 1000's plus of one way links within a week for the name of that toy.. and i'd bet they rank well for it pretty quick like...

[webmaster]

what can happen is a lot of links and quickly sets off an alert to the SE's and you may get manually reviewed. If they find that the links look like they were purchased or part of some scheme you may get a penalty, however in the case of just doing a good job at recip link building or rustins example, I cant see them penalizing you for this.

[ResaleBroker]

This question reminds me of an article I recently read about Google penalizing for a sudden influx of new pages. Here is a short blurb...

According to a Google engineer at the WMW conference, Google does not specifically filter for any one particular thing like that. Instead the algorithm looks at other similar situations and determines if the action is good or bad. For example, if a 2-page site suddenly adds 10,000 pages, there may in fact be a legitimate reason for it to do so. But the algorithm will first make the assumption that the action is "suspicious" and will then look at a large sample of other 2-page sites that have suddenly added 10,000 pages. If the majority of those sites were considered spammy, then your site will get lumped into the same spammy category. Of course, if the majority of those sites were deemed to be legitimate, then your site would likewise be deemed legitimate. Basically, he admitted that there may in fact be absolutely nothing wrong with your site, but it may be filtered or penalized if it fits the profile of other sites that have been marked as spammy.

I think the same could hold true for a sudden influx of new links.

[webmaster]

and we all know, if you hire me then you get a sudden influx of links lol - the upside - we have lots of other clients that have had a sudden influx of links! ergo the behavior is normal hehe

[ResaleBroker]

and we all know, if you hire me then you get a sudden influx of links...

That's a fact Jack! I'm still trying to catch up with the links you sent me.

[Terrapin1]

Welll, I guess the question becomes; "What is considered a sudden influx of links?" Would it be 5 links a week? Would it be 10 links a week? Would it be 2 a day????

So many questions, so few answers. From what I've been told, you can go do 100 links a month and it won't trigger off the search engines if you vary your anchor text and spread the anchor text to various pages on your site as opposed to just having inbound links to one site, usually the index page.

[ResaleBroker]

Welll, I guess the question becomes; "What is considered a sudden influx of links?" Would it be 5 links a week? Would it be 10 links a week? Would it be 2 a day????

IMO, the answer is going to depend on a load of different variables and/or combinations of variables.