Linkspun.com

From what I've read all the backlinking should look "natural"

The way I set it I was getting as much as 5 - 10 backlinks a day for some sites, now I've slowed down a bit.

There are two different approaches I've been advised so far:

- say no more than two backlinks per site a day so the process looks natural and not like "trading"

- as many backlinks as possible as Google should pick them up "naturally" over the course of time

Whilst avoiding excessive recip linking and prefering A->B->C or A->B C->D

Did anyone ever get penalized for excessive backlinking?

(I suppose this is to prevent certain popular BlackHat techniques)

I think this is one of those things where everyone is likely to have a different opinion, however a couple things to keep in mind are:

1. googlebot visits some sites many times per day and others only once per month or so. so just because you're adding 10 links per day, doesn't mean that they are finding 10 links per day.
2. different sites will acquire links at different rates, some fast, some slow.

What I get out of this is that it really doesn't matter very much how quickly you add links. It wouldn't make very much sense for SE's to sandbox a site merely for becoming too popular too fast, would it? On the other hand, if a site has 0 human traffic and is getting 10k links per day, that might also seem strange.

I think, and note I only say "I think", that you are more likely to be penalised for having too many backlinks with the same anchor text in a short space of time, than you are to have too many backlinks per se.

The biggest factor is what site you are getting links for....

If you are making a brand new site on a new domain and suddenly you start getting 30 links a day... that's suspicious. If you have an authority site that already ranks very well and has 1000s and 1000s of backlinks... adding 30 links a day is completely reasonable.

I'm sure wikipedia gets 100K+ new links back every day, but remember... you aren't wikipedia

Thanks!

What determines the frequency Google visits a site then, is this related to how often is the site content updated?

For example, I've installed the Google XML Sitemaps plugin with all my WP blogs and set it up so it should notify search engines once a new post is posted, do you have any experience whether this actually helps in any way?

I heard Google visits every websites every 3 days.

Some too many is no good, some others say there is no such thing as too many. Some say relevant backlinks are best others say a backlink is a backlink no matter what.

Do some tests with your sites. I have a site ranked #1 and #2 for two high traffic keywords and it barely has any backlinks. The site moved up the SERPs and all I did was submit it to 20 directories and update is a few times a month.

Some sites I get 10-20 relevant backlinks a day and they stay in the same position and some even lose ranking