7 replies to this topic

[jackc007]

Hi my name is jack and i have just joined this forum.

I have searched for the answer to this but cannot find it. Is it possible to have too many links from the same domain as i have just created my first ever website and have found a large domain with hundreds of articles about my niche which have high pr and do follow commenting allowed.

Would google see this as suspicious if the vast majority of my links were from the same domain, especially if they all appeared within a very short period of time?

Many thanks

[tomsk]

I think so yes, this is because I think I am currently experiencing it first hand.

[jackc007]

Right ok thanks, how many links do you think you have from that same domain? If you don't mind me asking

[Randy]

Depends upon what you mean exactly by the question I suppose.

If you're asking if you'll get penalized from having over a certain number of links from a specific domain, no I highly doubt it. If you mean you only have links from one domain or a major percentage of your links come from a single domain, yeah that would be more than a bit suspicious. Not so much attracting a penalty, but it wouldn't surprise me if the did something to limit the amount of value getting passed and possibly put the target site under a higher degree of scrutiny to see if anything else was funny looking.

Here's the way to think about pretty much anything when you're talking about incoming links only.

If doing something linke placing certain types of links or links from certain places that point to a site (any site) could cause it to get penalized when there is no reciprocation and nothing else out of order in the picture, it would be laughably easy for anybody to sabotage anybody else's site. That's not an arms race Google or any of the rest of the search engines want to start.

Trust me, if it were that easy none of my real competitors for any of my niches would show up anywhere in the top 100. It would be too easy for me to set up a completely anonymous, automated process to knock them out of the SERPs and keep them knocked out of the SERPs.

[Jill]

Right ok thanks, how many links do you think you have from that same domain? If you don't mind me asking

6.3432233333 per domain.

[Mhoram]

A scenario comes to mind: You create a new blog, and you convince a veteran blogger to add you to his blogroll, which instantly puts a link to your site on all his hundreds of pages. It wouldn't make much sense for search engines to penalize you for that; but it would make sense for them to discount multiple links from the same site, perhaps making them worth little more than a single link.

[qwerty]

Here's something that happened to me. Let me preface it by saying I don't consider it real proof of anything, and it was probably more than five years ago, so even if I did get caught in some filter, that filter may not even exist anymore.

I run a site for a friend of mine, and I don't charge her anything. I figured I may as well get something out of it, so I added a link to my site in the footer of every page of hers. Her site continued to grow, to the point where I had a couple of hundred pages from her domain all linking to mine.

I noticed at some point that my site wasn't showing up in Google searches for either my name or my company's name (sorry, it was one or the other and I can't remember which). I don't mean it was ranked lower than it should have been. I couldn't find it at all. I did some research, and there were quite a few other SEOs experiencing more or less the same thing. Some of them were theorizing that run-of-site links were the problem. Others believed that it was an issue of crossing the line of having more than some set percentage of a site's total backlinks coming from a single domain. I don't think this was part of the discussion at the time, but it may be worth noting that my friend's site is registered to me, so from Google's perspective (if they made use of registration information back then), this was a matter of me linking from one site I owned to another.

I ended up changing all those footer links so that they'd point to an internal page on my friend's site, which in turn linked to my site, so my backlinks from that one domain dropped from about 250 to 1. A week or two later, my rankings were back.

What does that prove? Like I said, nothing. But I think it says something about a site if its links reflect something other than a broad collection of other site site owners recommending it to their readers.

[jackc007]

Right ok thanks for the quick replys guys, guess i will just have to build these links slowly overtime whilst trying to get links elsewhere.