Many people use mass submission services to get themselves listed on thousands of directories, even if these links are all somehow relevant and none from bad neighborhoods is this good SEO and does Google really appreciate a site having that many inbound links?
Many believe that it is how quickly you get links that is important, or rather how slowly; if you get a thousand new links in one day then Google is going to assume that something is going on. Google has a number of ways of spotting links that aren’t organic and it is assumed that how quickly you get new links is one of them.
You could perhaps say that too many non-relevant links are too many then and another thing that some SEO experts suggest Google consider is how many of your links have exactly the same text as the anchor text. Anchor text should include some keywords but perhaps not always exactly the same keyword and where possible that keyword should be within a longer string, that string should always be a little different if possible. This is something that isn’t vital to stop you getting black flagged or banned from Google but Google may stop giving as much value to links if the anchor text is always identical or close to it.
Don’t always get links to the same page of your site: if you have a few hundred links all to your homepage and none to any other pages including content pages this again is, as far as SEO experts are aware, something that Google’s algorithm will flag up and give links less value as a result, though again it shouldn’t get you banned.
The best way to build up a lot of links in a way where Google should pay real attention to them though is to build them up organically, if you can’t build them up organically then focus on getting a few links from sites with not many outward links rather than submitting to every directory you can where your link will be sharing a page-rank of two or three with hundreds of others and Google will know it is a directory and not an organic link therefore anyway.
The real best way to get organic links if you can do it is to use link bait content, this involves not spending your time requesting or buying links or submitting to directories but creating unique content for your website that people will then link to without being asked, content is of course a vital part of SEO anyway and Google looks for pages with original content. Creating plenty of content that is linked to by all sorts of people on all sorts of different sites is simply going to impress Google and links that build up slowly look great to Google so you can have as many as you want: Facebook has around 55 million inbound links and a page-rank of ten after all.