Can you overkill backlinking?

Is there a Google penalty for too many?

[skipfactor]

I'm optimizing a real estate site, and I am signing up with many real estate directories that have PR3 or higher, and I'm careful not to choose spammy-looking sites. Should I continue this approach indefinitely, or is there some type of penalty associated w/ too many backlinks for an agent's relatively small Website?

Great banner-free site here, no reason to lurk, and I'm making a donation as soon as I have some incoming! C'MON WITH THE DANCE ALREADY. :)

[aek]

There's definitely no penalty for too many incoming links. No matter how big your website is. Keep doing what you're doing.

Yahoo has got about 650,000 backlinks and that hasn't had too many problems with search engine ranks :-)

[edited by: aek at 9:49 pm (utc) on Feb. 24, 2003]

[rogerd]

Too many links is never a problem, as long as they are from independent sites (i.e., a hundred links from a hundred related, interlinked sites might give you a great boost, or get you banned if it looks like too much interlinking to Google). As you note, it's better to avoid spammy looking or penalized sites. While a link or two from a PR0 site shouldn't hurt you, I suspect it would be a bad idea to have 60% of your links from penalized sites. Keep getting those links...

[skipfactor]

Geez, I get 2 replies before I can hit refresh. Thanks.

Newbie?: Why is there an exclamation(!) icon on this topic? I don't THINK I chose it when I posted, didn't mean to anyway.

[aek]

It just means that you have made a post in this topic. So you know which ones you're taking part in.