Could I be penalized by Google for having many backlinks coming to my new site?

Of course you could, thus the reason for the word Sand Box.

Thanks paulgl you made me laugh

@OP: if you are building links consistently then that's fine. Keep building backlinks consistently. Always remember QUALITY is key

and SANDBOX ??? never heard of it

Just seconding the quality thing. I have only had a site de-indexed once and I'm pretty sure that it wasn't for overzealous backlinking.

Make sure you are being linked to by good quality, relevant sites and that your content is up to scratch and you'll be fine. your site might dance around the SERPs for a bit but don't stress it

^ Spot on

Just remember to diversify your backlinking a bit more otherwise you may just be wasting your time with the article directories.

Throw in some Social Bookmarking, if done correctly it will give an impression of going viral too. Just use the ratios that you think real people would be backlinking your site.

Ie; Hundreds of articles and not one social bookmarking share would not be that effective (especially these days).

So for Gods sake, don't slow it down, just build momentum with a variety of backlinking methods and you'll do great.

You would practically have to build Hundreds of Thousands of the same type of links within a day to get penalized by Google. Think of it this way: as website owners, we have no control over how many people link back to our sites everyday. Now, suppose you were to post classified information, or breaking news, about President Obama on your website. How many backlinks do you think you would get within a day? You'd most likely get thousands of links pointing back to your site from a variety of sites. This phenomenon happens everyday with popular websites that have great content. People love to link back them, and Google expects this natural occurrence. Google is aware that you cannot control or slow down backlinking. What is not considered normal backlinking by Google is when your site receives hundreds of thousands of backlinks in the same day from sites in the same niche.

Also, suppose it were the case that Xrumer backlinks could cause your site to be penalized (don't worry, it's not). Well, wouldn't that be fine & dandy! All you would need to do to knock your competitors out of the #1 spot would be to start up Xrumer and blast their site with thousands of links! Boy, wouldn't that be nice, if it were only that simple!

Even if some of the sites that link to you are bad or "link farms", this will not hurt your site. Google may determine that those backlinks are of a lesser importance and they might not count as much towards your ranking, but they will not damage your site. Think of it this way: if it were possible to destroy a site's ranking this way, then we'd all be looking around for the next link farm to place our competitors' links on. Google realizes this, so it would be unfair to every website owner if backlinks (links on another website that point back to your site) could harm your site.

However, Google is getting more severe with linking these days: with Outbound Links (which are completely different from Backlinks). Google has shown us with the new Panda Update that it doesn't like link farms. Meaning: If you want your website to rank highly you should Not have thousands of links ON your site pointing to other sites. Any links that are physically on your website are Outbound Links, which are not the same as backlinks.

So, to summarize: Google will Not penalize you for the links that your website Receives, but it will penalize your site if it has too many Outbound Links (aka a Link Farm). Here is a very informative video showing that backlinks, which are also called "Incoming Links", cannot hurt your site: