Can Too Many Incoming Links Harm My Blog ?

Bloggers always have an obsession with links, they try all sorts of ways to gain incoming links to their blogs. While some of these ways are legitimitate, some may appear spammy in the eyes of the search engines.

So how do we build quality backlinks for our blogs, without getting penalized by the search engines? How do we start our link building campaign keeping the bots happy?

According to Google engineer Matt Cutts, there is no such thing as “too many links”. In the following video, Matt talks how you can build links without having to worry how the search bots sees or treats them:

Matt suggests:

1. Let the links come organically: Think of sites like Twitter, Facebook and Digg. These sites gets a lot of links everyday. This is because all these websites have superb content and people find their service really useful. Hence the links come by themselves.

2. Stay away from paid links: Don’t go emailing people like “I want to trade links with you”. The search bots can determine the pattern of the incoming links to any website and they can analyze whether the link provides value or not. Hence buying too many links won’t produce fruitful results, if you consider the bigger picture.

3. You may have a small website or a blog, it does not matter: As long as the content and the user experience is good, the size of your website does not really matter. If you have unique content and people love reading your blog or using your service, links will come by themselves. Some people will tell their friends and they will again tell their friends and in this way the message will spread virally.

As long as links come organically, you need not worry about how the search engines treat those links.

Suggested reading: How Long Does it take Google To Recrawl or Reindex a Page