I love all the Internet marketing arguments. One of my favorites is on getting backlinks. The burning question is this…”How fast is too fast?” If you ask 100 people, you’ll get 100 different answers. And as you know, with all the automated tools that we have today, you can get backlinks pretty quickly. But forgetting about the pros and cons of doing this, assuming there are any cons, there might be a reason why you wouldn’t want to get backlinks too quickly. Like I said, this is just my opinion, so take it with a grain of salt.

Let’s say you’re venturing into a brand new niche. You put up your site and quite honestly, you really don’t know how popular it’s going to be. One way to gauge the popularity would be to see how many other sites link to you ON THEIR OWN. That’s a key phrase there that I hope you will take to heart. See, if people take the time to link to your site without you having to do anything, it must mean that they think you have a winner. Then, you can look at the number of backlinks you have to see just HOW popular your site is becoming.

But…if you artificially increase the number of backlinks you have and get, say, 10,000 of them, how will you ever REALLY know if anybody cares about your site. If 9,000 of those backlinks are worthless because they’re from sites not even related to what yours is about (because you’ve artificially inflated them) how are you ever going to know the REAL numbers? You won’t, and ultimately you COULD be wasting a lot of time on a site that NOBODY really cares about.

For this reason, I suggest that at least for the first 30 to 60 days, you let things develop naturally. Market your site and see who takes a genuine interest in it.

As for the pros and cons of fast backlinking, the arguments will go on forever. Some people claim that by getting backlinks fast, you will rise up the SERPs quickly. Others say that if a search engine like Google sees that you’re getting these too fast, they’ll sandbox you. I have personally not seen any evidence of either. Truth is, backlinking is only a PART of the whole SEO equation. Yes, it’s important, but there are other things that are JUST as important. Leave those out and your site is as good as dead.

Anyway, that’s my two cents on this whole fast versus slow backlinking issue.

Like I said…take it for what it’s worth to you.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

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