Q: I have a business selling big and tall men’s coats online. I was going to start attempting to build some links as suggested in your book but it was suggested to me that if I managed to get too many links, that my site may get Google sandboxed as it is only 1 year old and may look suspect.

Could you tell me if this is maybe correct, and if so what speed should I try to get links added. My friend suggested 1 a week.

A: It’s true that there are penalties for websites building a lot of links in an “unnatural” way in a short time, but we don’t think this would be an issue for someone in your situation. We think this problem most often applies to spammers, scrapers, or people who own hundreds or thousands of domains and work to build status by interlinking between them. Your site contains real, unique content and a legitimate product, and should be able to build links naturally without any problems on the search engines.

If you are concerned that you’re building links too fast (that’s a pretty nice problem to have!), just be sure that they’re coming from a wide variety of types of sites (that is, they are not all from within comment postings, or bulletin boards, instead, they are a mix of blogs, social bookmarking sites, static sites, etc.), and most importantly, that as many links as possible are from sites that focus on similar content to your website. Keep your focus on the overall site quality and the relevance to your target audience and it’s very unlikely there will be any penalty.