There are always discussions like this one going on in forums with people looking for help, salvation, or forgiveness after getting what they might call “too aggressive” in their link building.
Have you ever been tempted to just take up one of the myriad offers to spend $10 to “get your site linked on thousands of pages?” We all have at some point. It is frustrating waiting on Google. Sometimes you might let yourself actually believe you can speed up the process by “aggressively” adding hundreds or thousands of links to your site from extremely useless and junky “neighborhoods.”
It should be frustrating to wait on Google because waiting on Google is STUPID! Waiting on any single source of organic traffic to kick in as if you don’t have a thousand other things you can do to bring traffic is ridiculous.
Google will come around when they are damn good and ready. They will rank you when they feel like it. Yes you can make sure they know about you ASAP, but you cannot force a billion-dollar advertising agency to just drop everything and pay attention to your site with a #1 listing because you think it would be nice.
No amount of artificial link buying will make the process go any faster with results that you are going to be happy with in the long-term. You might fake Google out for a minute, but they will adjust to stupid link building and take appropriate action to knock you back down to earth.
And it hurts really bad when that’s the only significant source of traffic you have. This is when people usually see the writing on the wall and start realizing Google is one website on the internet. High traffic, yes, but still one source of traffic on a web with thousands of extremely high traffic sites.
Spending too much time on engines means you are neglecting all the other traffic available to you. Traffic from social media sites, satellite pages, and profiles on social or web 2.0 sites like Squidoo* are the bread and butter. Scoring in Google might feel likea steak dinner, but it doesn’t happen without buttering your bread first. *Yes Squidoo is alive and well as you will see in Vegas or shortly after if you aren’t coming.
Link building is one part know-how, two parts organic because of good content, and one part old fashioned hard work and dedication.
No where in the recipe is buying 1000 crappy links. It doesn’t work. Even if Google doesn’t penalize you for it you won’t get anything out of it. Believe me, I’ve tested it at least twice per year for the last several years just to make absolutely sure!