How Many Backlinks Per Month Is Safe? (Answered)

In this article, we’ll answer the question, “how many backlinks per month is safe?”

This is an important topic to cover because you’re probably wondering how many links can you make a month for SEO without getting penalized by search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Bing.

So, to help you keep your site safe, you’ll find all of the answers you below need about the speed and quantity of creating monthly backlinks.

It also includes information about Google’s patent on link velocity and freshness, and how it can impact your website’s rankings in the search engine results pages (SERPs) if you’re not careful during a link building campaign.

How Many Backlinks Per Month?

10 backlinks per month is safe for a new website on average. However, even 40 to 50 links per month is safe if they are built organically and within the search engine webmaster guidelines. A good strategy is to start with a low number of links and increase the quantity each month.

How Many Backlinks Are Too Many?

There is no set number for too many backlinks because every web page will acquire more organic links over time. The only issue with getting too many backlinks for a website is if those links are low-quality, spammy, or part of a link scheme, which could harm search engine rankings.

How Fast Can I Make New Backlinks?

When it comes to building links for a website, you may be wondering how fast you can make new backlinks without receiving a penalty from search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Bing.

The rate at which links are acquired is known as “link velocity”. And many people in the SEO community believe that a high rate of link velocity (or growth) is a bad thing for a website’s backlink profile.

However, that idea is based merely on speculation and not grounded in facts. Google has a patent on Information Retrieval Based on Historical Data that describes how a new website with a high rate of link velocity can be considered to be more relevant than an older site with slower link growth.

According to the language in the patent, the idea of getting too many backlinks too fast is not necessarily a bad thing. It states:

“Consider the example of a document with an inception date of yesterday that is referenced by 10 back links. This document may be scored higher by search engine 125 than a document with an inception date of 10 years ago that is referenced by 100 backlinks because the rate of link growth for the former is relatively higher than the latter.”

For some search queries, Google’s search engine algorithm uses the freshness of the content and the velocity of link growth to determine the best position for a URL to rank in the SERPs. This part of the algorithm is called “Query Deserves Freshness” and it applies to search results that deserve up-to-date search results.

Therefore, getting a lot of backlinks per month at a fast rate, and keeping that pace over time, can improve your search engine rankings. Especially for keywords that require fresh content for the users.

However, the patent goes on to say more about this in regards to link velocity schemes:

“While a spiky rate of growth in the number of back links may be a factor used by search engine 125 to score documents, it may also signal an attempt to spam search engine 125. Accordingly, in this situation, search engine 125 may actually lower the score of a document(s) to reduce the effect of spamming.”

So what does this mean exactly for you and how many backlinks you can make per month? Well, there’s another important clause in the patent that gives clarity to this question:

“Naturally developed web graphs typically involve independent decisions. Synthetically generated web graphs, which are usually indicative of an intent to spam, are based on coordinated decisions, causing the profile of growth in anchor words/bigrams/phrases to likely be relatively spiky.”

As you can see, the algorithm can detect unnatural patterns based on web spam techniques that typically leave footprints from a link building scheme (e.g., keyword-rich anchor text). If you’re trying to manipulate PageRank through unnatural link building like this, then your website or individual web pages could receive a manual action or algorithmic penalty that lowers the rankings in the search engine.

The best strategy for how many backlinks per month is safe for SEO is to worry less about the total number and more about the variety of anchor text being used so the links look natural to the algorithm.

Plus, if you read this other article on how many backlinks should a website have, you’ll discover that the total number of links is not as important as the quality of those backlinks and which websites they come from.

Having a low number of high PR backlinks is much better than a high number of low PR backlinks because high PageRank sites typically only link out to other high-quality sites with demonstrated trust and authority in their industries. So your goal should always be to acquire backlinks with the highest PageRank you can for your website; the faster the better.

How Long Does It Take for Monthly Backlinks to Work?

It can take up to two months for backlinks to work for SEO and improve the rankings for a web page in the SERPs. It takes around 60 days because Google has to find the backlinks, assess the quality, transfer PageRank value, and reindex the linked page in the search engine.

Also, as mentioned in this other article on how long does it take for backlinks to work, a website is crawled at a different rate by Google’s search engine spider (Googlebot). And each site has its own designated crawl budget for the number of pages Googlebot will crawl and index in the SERPs within a given timeframe.

The time it takes from the first discovery of a backlink to the final shift in rankings for a target keyword cannot be sped up by the website owner. However, the effect of backlinks compounds over time. Therefore, it’s important to always be creating new backlinks every day and each month through natural and organic link building methods.

How About the Number of Daily Backlinks?

The answer for how many links per day is safe is similar to monthly backlinks: quantity doesn’t matter as long as the links are built organically and/or the backlinks have a natural mix of anchor text. For more details about this, check out that linked article.

The Number of Backlinks Per Month Summary

I hope you enjoyed this guide on answering the question about how many backlinks per month is safe for SEO.

As you discovered, there is no set number for how many links can you make a month as long as you’re following the Webmaster Guidelines published by search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

If you’re creating high-quality content that people enjoy and it generates a spike of hundreds or even thousands of new backlinks per month, then you don’t have to worry about getting a manual action or algorithm penalty that lowers your rankings in the search engines.

Remember: Link schemes typically leave a footprint that the algorithm can detect, and if you’re playing things safe, then you can make as many backlinks as you want each month.