Content that goes viral naturally attracts links quickly.

For example, authoritative content that answers a question such as “What is the Met Gala?” naturally attracts a lot of links very quickly because it’s so useful, and in this case timely.

This particular article got almost 200 referring domains in just 7 days.

As a result of its great performance in such a short period, it ranks #1 for organic search for the phrase “What is the Met Gala”:

This article has also amassed more than an estimated 6.3k in organic traffic:

This is a common scenario for news content, authority pieces, or viral articles – They attract lots of links very quickly, and not only do they NOT get penalized, they actually rank really well.