Too many Links at one time?

Is there such a thing?

[fashezee]

From one index to another; if you surpassed a certain amount of backward links;
would google discredit them?
i.e.
If your site jumps from 2 inbound links to 10,000 within one index;
can this adversely affect your site?

[darkroom]

this is probably a sitution that hasn't happened before....but i would guess that this shouldn't harm your site in any way..i would be interested to know how you accomplished this.

[fashezee]

I was just contemplating the fact that Google might have an acceptable average
amount of backward links that it would accept from any given site.

If the top sites on the internet are gaining 500 to 1000 backward links within
a given index (just for arguement sake); another site that would gain 5000 links
would obviously indicate to google that there is something not kosher about that
site, no?

[rogerd]

Fashezee, there has been some speculation that too many identical links could cause the link text benefit to be downgraded. A subset of that speculation is that time might be a factor, too, i.e., if all these identical links came up in the space of a week or two. From what I can tell, this is mostly speculation, although there is some suggestive data; we do know that Google became sensitive to Googlebombing, and it's conceivable that some legit links could get devalued if Google somehow kicked them into a "bomb" category.

Others say the whole idea is goofy, noting that Microsoft has millions of links that say "Microsoft", and even Acme Widgets probably has mostly links that say "Acme Widgets".

A quick jump from 2 to 10K might trigger some kind of link growth rapidity flag, but we don't really know if such a thing exists. Are these 10K links on different sites, or on 10K pages of a single site? Do tell us how you make out... :)

[fashezee]

I have not attained 10,000 backward links; that will be my christmas wish though.

link growth rapidity flag

I'm almost sure that something like this exists. Google is aware that people are
going to hunt for links just for PR. I would like to know how many links would
cause the links to start lossing their value?

To all PubCon attendees - can someone ask Mr.Google Representative?

[rogerd]

The only argument against this kind of flag is that quick link increases can occur naturally. If a new site gets covered by CNN and USAToday, for example, it may attract a lot of links in a very short time. This is also true in the blog world, where many bloggers may glom onto a particular site/topic at the same time.

[mil2k]

we do know that Google became sensitive to Googlebombing, and it's conceivable that some legit links could get devalued if Google somehow kicked them into a "bomb" category.

Yes but i think their idea of tackling it involved checking the title and body of the site in concern. If the keyword was not present in either of this then it might get categorized as "Google Bombing". It becomes dicey when the linked page has a robots.txt file barring search engines to index it.

Coming to original question at present I don't think so. Wouldn't be surprised if they were experimenting with such an idea. They always do such research on a small subset of the index.

[ppg]

>> quick link increases can occur naturally. If a new site gets covered by CNN and USAToday, for example, it may attract a lot of links in a very short time

But if the threshhold was set high enough, the amount of innocent sites that would trip the alarm would be lessened somewhat. Do you think Google accepts a certain amount of collateral damage in its efforts to keep the results free of spam?

[rogerd]

Do you think Google accepts a certain amount of collateral damage in its efforts to keep the results free of spam?

Not only do I believe this, I've used those same words in other threads about topics like multi-hyphenated domains. I certainly don't think Google is callous or evil. I DO think they test various algorithms and see which produce the best results. If your site happens to resemble something they are filtering for, too bad. If millions of sites get bombed, they'll probably try something else. If 95% of the SERPs look better, though, and most "good" sites aren't affected, no problem.

One specific example was the PR0 debacle of a couple of years ago. One of the things that triggered the penalty was a "themeindex" file, a signature of Zeus software. It seemed that there was no review to determine whether one's link directory was of high, indifferent, or low quality - they all got clobbered. Link directories of decent quality weren't the only collateral damage. Included in this purge were some pages that had nothing to do with Zeus, but which had the bad luck to have been named "themeindex" by their creators.

In short, Google is algorithm-driven. They will tweak the algorithm to produce better results on average. Sometimes these tweaks may adversely affect some sites with great content, but what can one do?