How many links do I need?

Your inbound link-building activities fall into two groups: active and passive. The former involves you actively contacting other sites to submit or request a link. The latter involves link baiting, where you create attractive content and invite others (in a more passive way) to link back to it.

For sufficient quantity and quality, I recommend that you actively build at least 250 and not more than 750 unique inbound links, containing your phrases that pay in the anchor text. By unique, I mean that you only count one link per domain (so 25 links from different pages on www.otherdomain1.com only count as one link).

If your niche is very competitive by all means build more links, but avoid actively building more than 1,500 links yourself. You can have too many links. There are several examples of what I call “superoveroptimized” sites that have fallen back through the rankings. I won’t name them here (for legal among other reasons) but take my word for it. The point is that there is a very fine line between seeking authority and spamming Google.

While there is no hard-and-fast ceiling, if you are getting up into the 15,000+ zone for inbound links then you may be putting yourself at risk. It’s not just the absolute number but also the speed with which links are acquired and the pattern of those links. Anything that looks too good to be true generally is.

Related SEO Tips

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Links from other webmasters are viewed by search engines as unbiased third party votes.

Importance of Number of Links on the Page
Any page only has a certain amount of link popularity which it can redistribute to other pages.

Recognizing Links with No Value
It will be useless to exchange link with site that has no value. Below are some links that have no value