Build My Site for Free

Matt Cutts: I wouldn’t worry about that really. There is no such thing as building too many links as long as you’re doing it in a great organic way. Let me give you a couple of examples.

Think about sites like Twitter, FaceBook, Digg, and sites that people go to every day, all day long and spend lots of time there. People link to those sites because they find cool things there, or they like the stuff that they see there.

Those links are editorially based because they are given by merit. People link to these websites because they like them, not because Digg emailed everybody and said, “Hey I’ll trade links with you if you link back to me,” or Twitter said, “Hey I’d like to buy some links from you, and you can pass PageRank through them,” or anything like that.

The real objective in making a successful website is to make something that’s so awesome that you get the links basically for free. It’s word of mouth where people say, “Ha! Did you see this great site? It’s called YouTube and you can watch videos and it’s really a lot of fun!”

Then they email each other around and you get viral word of mouth or buzz and people link to your site naturally. That’s the sort of site you want to build because if you can do that, whether it be a fantastic blog or a funny website, or whatever, those links will come naturally and you won’t have to work for them nearly as hard.

If those links are being attracted on their own on the basis of the merit or how interesting your website is then get as many links as you can. There is no reason what-so-ever to worry. And if you think about it it’s not as if Google.com got some number of links and then we capped it. It’s just the fact that as long as people want to link to Google we’re happy to have those links.

As long as you’re abiding by the guidelines and as long as you’re doing things that anybody else, including your competitors if they knew about it wouldn’t really be that worried about. I say get as many links as you can.