Burst of Links & Search Rankings

[fraser37]

If a site builds all its links in a short period of time and then the site does not get many links after, would this site drop in SERPS?

[cnvi]

Yes. I've seen it happen. If you obtain links too quickly, some search engines may see that as an attempt to spam. However some search engines such as Google are good at determining if its spam or authentic.

For instance, if your site publishes a cure for cancer and 10,000 sites link to yours overnight, Google would probably identify that as legitimate. If you sell gift baskets and you get 1000 links overnight, that is probably going to be viewed as spam.

I dont work for the search engines so I cannot comment with further specifics but in the work I do every day, I see sites that build links too quickly get penalized. Too quickly means more than 50 a night.. more than 250 a week.. more than 1000 a month is too much. If you are obtaining links/ publishing link at a rate of a few dozen a week (and no more) and they are relevant and useful for your end users, you should be fine.

We have clients who build links consistently at a low rate over a long period of time and they do very well both in terms of traffic received from those links, and serps.

[martinibuster]

When a site is newsworthy it attracts a lot of links and is temporarily boosted. I have a site that every once in awhile attracts a lot of links and jumps up for the one word name of a well known entity.

It's probably not the correct answer for this query, except for when people are linking to it for a timely reason. It's been pointed out by a Googler that Google is sensitive to newsworthy topics, and my experience seems to bear that out.

So if you experience/engineer a burst of links, rank well, then blow away, that may be a reason why.