It's very difficult to get penalized for link building. You have to be doing some wild shit. Some niches have higher tolerances than others. Local niches have much higher tolerances to exact match anchors and sheer volume of links, That being said, here are some general rules.
1) Low and slow is always the best strategy for long-term growth. Feed the site 3-5 links per month for the first 4-6 months. Once you start seeing a bunch of keywords hitting within the top 100, then you can start to press a bit more. Meaning, you can increase the number of links. Get granular. Track the pages that are starting to rank in GSC, then link accordingly.
2) If you want to look as natural as possible, only build links that look natural (hurpy durpy). Look at all the metrics (DR, link profiles, spam scores, neighborhoods, relevancy, etc..). Choose wisely.
3) Tiered linking works like a champ if you know what you are doing, but this is for another post.
4) You can use niche edits and guest posts, but use them strategically and sparingly. The only sites I've seen get hit due to link penalties are ones that are way overdoing it on specific types of links. For example, there are a shit ton of really bad niche edit networks out there (mostly hacked sites).
Keep it within those parameters, and you won't have any problems getting penalized. Honestly, I've seen way more websites get hit with on-page penalties than link penalties in the last 4-5 years. Like I said, it's really hard to get whacked on an algorithmic penalty, let alone a manual penalty.
If you have any follow-up questions, fire away
