Gradual Link Building - Google Update Frequency

[Skinwalker]

Recently our company has launched a new site for the company. The domain name is old, been around since 1999 and we've decided to focus on the link building this year since our on-page SEO is pretty complete.

What we are concerned about is that since this domain name has no rank for the KW that we are going to focus on -we're concerned about the "natural" progression of the link building for the site.

We understand that it is not a good idea to "all of a sudden" have quality themed links suddenly detected by google, so I guess Im asking what is a good natural progression to build links so that you don't get red-flagged by google? Or is this even something to worry about?

Anyone have any idea of how frequent the datacenters are dancing these days?

Thanks,
SW

[tedster]

Google is continually spidering and indexing newly discovered links, pretty much every day. Their current technology does not require a brand new data-set to be rolled out before newly indexed link juice and PR are affecting the rankings. Full blown index changes involve "dial-turning" in the algorithm - that happens pretty fast too, every few days or so. The old days of the "Google dance" just don't apply.

Those who have been in site clinics with Google reps at conferences have seen the power of their current tools in action - they can easily uncover manipulated links, "feeder networks" of co-owned sites, purchased links and so on. Of course Google can't catch absolutley every link that is in some way artificially acquired, but I always assume that most of this kind of link building will be transparent to Google.

I also feel that Google is pragmatic - they know it's going to happen, and Google reps even say things like "get more backlinks" to some site owners. So what's needed is a balanced backlink profile. Whatever kind of link building you do, you need at least some of those "freely given editorial citations" to be popping up in parallel with the rest of it.

It's not really a numbers game, it's a quality game. I know of sites that are outranking their competition when that competition has ten times the raw backlink count.