A well known Search Engine Optimization strategy that most serious bloggers keep in mind is that the more links that you have pointing to your blog from other sites the higher your page will be ranked in search engines like google. This is a generally accepted strategy for building the profile of your blog and is in fact one of the strengths of blogging (as at the heart of our medium is the linking that bloggers do to one another).
But can you have too many inbound links pointing at your blog?
The growing opinion of SEO experts is that you can. In fact a recent patent by Google indicates that sites that have big increases in inbound links to them in short periods (especially young sites) can actually be treated as spam sites by Google’s algorithm.
You see a common strategy of spammers is to add masses of links pointing from many sites to their money making sites in order to fool Google into thinking they are popular and therefore worthy of a high page ranking.
It is increasingly becoming accepted that when launching a new site that the best way for it to grow in it’s search engine ranking is to accumulate inbound links in a slow by steady way – gathering links in what is considered to be ‘natural’ patterns.
So next time you launch a blog don’t link to it from every page on all your other blogs at once or buy masses of text links or even enter into lots of link exchange programs – rather let your blog grow in it’s own time. You might want to nudge it along slowly from time to time – but the best way to do this is simply to write great content that lots of other sites will naturally link up to.
There are many articles on this topic around the web (including others on ProBlogger – but you might want to read Do too many links hurt your web site? as one of the latest articles to do the rounds on the topic.
