Does Google Penalize for too many inbound links

I see that you have already asked this on another forum.

Quote from: Dingleberry

If you were hired to strictly do link exchange crap, it's a complete waste of time and money.

Since you specifically ask the question about links and Google, it's clear you are "getting" links for Google, right? That should tell you that it will not work no matter what you do.

Build a great site with good content and links will come anyway. Exchanging links is a thing of the past. If they are "one" way only links, then fine, as long as the site is relevant to your site.

I'll bet this "electronics" site has more problems than a simple case of lacking in incoming links. Actually, having 50 or so now is more than enough.

What the hell? Huh

First: Being that you have already had replies to this on another forum (and questionable advice at that), it is obvious, to me anyway, that you want to do this and are just going to keep asking till someone gives you the answer you want; so go ahead and do it.

Every webmaster, with the exception of that crowd on the aforementioned forum (and I'm not so certain that they weren't spinning you), will tell you how important backlinks are to get you site ranked. The better those backlinks are (e.g.: on high PR sites and sites with a similar theme) the better they will work for you.

Just designing a site and letting it sit there is not going to produce links. Why would it? Who is going to link to it if you don't tell them about it? And, if you don't let anybody else know about it, how are they going to find it and why would the search engines be that interested in it?

I'll give you an example (which I have used on this forum before) of two sites I built; both are hosted by the same service. One of them has plenty of content while the other is nothing but a dinky little portal. As I was going to add even more content to the first site, I didn't bother to promote it. The dinky little portal was promoted through my usual free (eegads!!!) promotion resources, and I also got links to it on other sites. Both sites have been up the same amount of time, though the dinky little portal was actuallt down for a little over a month. The end result? The dinky little portal with little content is a PR4 site; the site which was not promoted, but has plenty of content, is a PR0 site.

Of course content is important, but it don't mean much if you don't tell anybody; and the way you tell people on the web is by getting links to your site.

Where you may get penalized for having too many links is if you suddenly had, oh say, 100s of links to your site suddenly popup; as the search engines would consider that spamming your link. You can do that with link farms and FFA pages. Although I recommend FFA pages (yeah, like I really want to hear another diatribe about this) when you are first trying to get your site indexed, as they are crawled by bots but serve no other purpose, once you have been indexed you don't want to use them as they can (potentially) have negative drawbacks.

20 links in 6 months? I do that in a day.

I did not intend to do the aforementioned test of two sites; I just made a boo boo (I could have been crude, but I chose not to be). What it taught me was a valuable lesson in promoting a site, rather than vesting in wishful thinking.

Since you seem to be particularly concerned about the links you are wanting to place; well, where are you wanting to place the links?

If you want permission to post 20 links in six months (oh please, set higher goals) you have my permission. I can't think of 20 places where you could have a link which is going to hurt you; even if it was 20 FFA sites, that's nothing.