Browsing forums you will find this question asked many times by newbies. Most old timers and some people that just like to repeat the answer they where told will tell you 20 or so a month, after letting your site simmer for 6 months.

So at what point do you blow off all the bullshit that you read on the forums and start doing your own thing, the way you see it should be done!

The answer is now, as anything you read about SEO (including this) is just speculation, as none of us have a direct line to any of the search engines where we can ask and get 100% answer to our questions.

So how fast should you build links?

Let me show you a formula that I came up with some years ago, or rather a method that you can use to get a VERY solid number on the amount of links to build per month that will not get your domain put in a filter, and be seen as natural by the search engines.

Example:

Lets say I’m building a webmaster blog, and one of my top keywords are ‘SEO Blog’.

I hop on over to Google and type in SEO Blog, then take the top 10 domains and store them into a text file.

mattcutts.com
beanstalk-inc.com
toprank.blogspot.com (Removed)
abakus-internet-marketing.de
news.stepforth.com (Removed)
cre8pc.com
hawaiistreets.com
seobook.com
blogtopsites.com

Its important to note that some domains like blogspot, are not good for this example and I do not include them in my formula as they are over linked. Just like about.com, etc which covers so many topics that they have mad ranking and too many links to so many pages it skews the calculation IMO.

So with that said I’m going to remove some of the domains so that I get a cleaner result (toprank.blogspot.com, and news.stepforth.com have been removed from my list.).

At this point you can use any Whois tool that you like to lookup the domain information. What we will be looking for is the created date of the domain name.

My results:

mattcutts.com: 21-06-2003
beanstalk-inc.com: 08-30-2004
abakus-internet-marketing.de: REMOVED NO CREATE DATE
cre8pc.com: 08-16-1997
hawaiistreets.com: 07-28-2005
seobook.com: 09-23-2003
blogtopsites.com: 03-30-2004

At this point Im left with about 6 domains, which IMO is fine for this example, but you may want to use more domains to get a stronger reading of how fast to build links.

At this point you will want to use the search engines (not recommended) or your favorite link checking script to get a calculation on the number of back links that each domain has. I personally use SEO Elite!

mattcutts.com: 397 links
beanstalk-inc.com: 279 links
cre8pc.com: 271 links
hawaiistreets.com: 17 links
seobook.com: 1242 links
blogtopsites.com: 1242 links

Once you have each domains number of backlinks you want to take the domain’s number of links and divide the number of links by the number of months that it has been around.

Example:

mattcutts.com created on 21-06-2003 and has 397 links. At the time of this post his domain has been around 36 months, so we take 397/36 which equals 11 rounded.

Now we know mattcutts.com has built around 11 links per month for the last 36 months, but we are not going to just use his domain for our estimation as he could have gotten more links from being the cool kid on the block for working at Google Inc. LOL

After processing all the domains and coming up with the number of links per month they have gotten since they where created we get the following:

mattcutts.com: 11
beanstalk-inc.com: 13
cre8pc.com: 3
hawaiistreets.com: 2
seobook.com: 39
blogtopsites.com: 48

At this point we need to take the total number of links for all domains and add them up then divide them by the number of domains to get the average.

All links per month is 116, divided by 6 domains equals 19 links per month.

Now that we are done with all that fun processing and data collection we know we can build a seo blog or a website related to the topic at a rate of around 19 links per month without google taking notice.

The number WILL change if you check other industries but on average its around 20, but if you are really picky and want to find out what you really need I recommend using the above.

I have been surprised many times when using the above formula in some industries where I would think 20-50 links a month was normal and come to find out the average was as little as 6-11 a month, and in some places as high as 100 a month.

It’s best to check it you really want to know how hard your going to have to work to get top ranking!

In my experience you should be able to build the above number of links for the 6 months the domain is simmering, and will be ranking very well in Google time it gets around as Google will see your sites as growing in popularity and will promote your website compared to demoting it like other sites that under or over build links.

I think it’s also good to note that you may see some domains like seobook.com that have thousands of links, but if you follow the above formula you should be able to rank with them at the top of the SERP once your site gets out of the SandBox with lower number of links as you will be getting links in a tolerance level that Google likes, and because of that Google will promote your site to the top of the SERP. A good example of this is hawaiistreets.com that is under building their links. If they raised the number of links per month from 2 to 19 I bet they would move to the top 5 sites if not the top 3 or number 1.

How did I come up with this?

Some time back I was reading a article on programming and inventory tracking for big supermarkets like Wal-Mart and one of the things they did to track employee theft was to track the number of items coming into and out of the store to be able to find locations in the store where employees where taking items.

From that I came up with the idea that Google used their search results like inventory, and they track it just like Wal-Mart would for events that are out of the normal patterns they are expecting from the data base and sub results for keywords or industry related topics.

At this point I have not developed a program to do the above because so many sites like about.com, etc take up the results and I feel its better when you do it by hand because of that. Plus I just don’t feel like doing it at this time, but if you are a developer and you wish to make such a program please have the respect to give me credit in the about section of the program or under the form on the site with a link to my blog.