Where should you put the demarcation line between just right and too much? In doing search engine optimization services, how much linka is too much?

Eric ward answers the query:

I could take the easy way out and say "it depends," and I have done that for years, because it's true. But, let's dig a little deeper. First, you have to qualify what you mean by "too much linking." Too much for what? For search rank? For link popularity? For click traffic? For your health? The reason most people ask the "too much" question is fear of penalty by any or all search engines. And it is in fact true that the only reason to ever worry about having too many links would be because you fear a search engine may penalize you for it. There are only three reasons a site will attract thousands, or even millions of links.

First, the site is so useful to so many people that everyone naturally links to it. See this obvious example.

Second, a site is dedicated to a topic that suddenly and without expectation generates massive amounts of natural news coverage, like Hurricane Katrina did.

Third, someone is actively seeking links for a site far beyond what it would naturally be able to obtain.

So any engine looking to penalize a site just because it has a huge number of links, or a sudden surge in new links, would have to have the ability to algorithmically recognize when such surges were natural, or manipulated. My belief is that isn't as hard as it sounds. It's one thing to attract links from a few thousand news and/or mining industry sites, it's quite another to have thousands of links from sites that have absolutely nothing to do with each other.