Off Page SEO - Too Many Backlinks Too Quickly?

One of the most common questions I'm asked, is how may backlinks is it safe to get per week or per month? There is conflicting information on the internet about this point, and I think quite a few people have missed the point when it comes to safe numbers of backlinks.

Search engines like to see things that look natural, so as long as what you're doing is something that would naturally happen - then usually you're OK. Of course - if you go & get 20,000 backlinks from different domains in a week, then it's impossible this is going to happen naturally, if you do this you must be using some kind of a cheat, so this is going to trip the search engines spam filters.

If you're getting backlinks from natural methods, articles, directory submissions, blogs (but pointless in many cases as most are set to nofollow), manual submitting to social bookmarking sites, forum posts, using link bait to bring natural backlinks - then you don't really need to worry about setting off the spam filters - as long as you don't make this very common mistake :

Using the same anchor text in every backlink

If you do use the exact same anchor text (the words that are linked in the backlink) then you may inadvertently set of spam filters.

Why? Simply because it doesn't appear to the search engines to be natural - the search engines have auto spam filters that are set to detect unnatural behavior, if you were using some kind of automated shortcut to getting lots of backlinks quickly, then it would make sense that each one would have the exact same details - if you were doing each one manually, and a mix of backlinks you've initiated - and those that others have initiated without your involvement (which would naturally happen with good sites that are worth linking to thanks to the content) then each backlink wouldn't have exactly the same anchor text, or description.

As far as anyone can tell it's the anchor text that is really taken notice of, but I personally would recommend using different versions of the descriptions too - just to make it clear to the search engines that these are manually gained links and that there's nothing automated or corner cutting going on.