How many links on a page explanation?

[drang3d]

Hi

I've read many threads discussing what is the optimum amount of links on a page. My question is this and it may sound a little dumb but does that include your menu structure? Or is it just clean links (links in content)? Or is it both?

Cheers

DRang3d

[Micheal Pannell Realtor]

under 100, i think i have like 25 to 50 on my link pages

[Lydia]

If you are referring to internal links or site navigation links I haven't heard of any hard and fast rule about that.

For outgoing links, if they are relevant to your site topic, and valued sites in google, I don't think there is a limit there (at least within reason). I know many would disagree with that, including some of the REW staff, but I stand by my statement. I'm not aware of any sites that can be demonstrated to have lost PR or trustrank from excess linking to quality websites. It's 'natural' to provide logical sites that add value to your content or of interest to your traffic. After all, if you had 15 links to Google maps and 10 to Wikipedia for areas of your town all on one page, it would not be logical to consider that 'spammy'. Keep in mind that SE's such as Google can detect 'spam' links by following IP blocks, link age, anchors, domains, etc., so as long as you are white-hat you are golden. By the same token, Google is also known to be trying to detect link directories, particularly by recognizing recip links and certain anchors such as 'directory' and 50 state names behind it, so be aware of that. OTOH, are recip directories really 'natural content' useful to your visitors anyay?? Should you be surprised that Google does that?

Now I'm waiting to be corrected by someone on that last paragraph in 3, 2, 1 ...

Some people think that you can 'leak' your site PR by excess linking, but well, that's not really how pagerank works, although the PR you give to the destination page by virtue of the link may be diluted- just read up on the PR algo. It's not a secret.

[BrandonSternfield]

If you have too many links (I'm saying enough for google to notice) they will see why you are linking, and thus make those links provide you nothing.

It's not penalty, it's just null.

[Micheal Pannell Realtor]

Lydia, sorry for the highjack but where did you get that image of the us on your front page. I want it.

[Lydia]

NuHomeSource - The US flag was snipped out of my Google Analytics geomap page. That's the most 'dots' you can get on the map btw, Google won't let you view more than 500 locations. I don't want to give away my traffic but it's way more than that!

I wish that I could say the map was my idea, but it's not - I saw it on Drew Nick's Greenville SC Real Estate website. I sent him an email asking him if I could do the same thing, lol!

[BrandonSternfield]

Also not to hijack, but Lydia, both of your links go to the same page?

[judyo]

Here's an exact snippet from Google Webmaster guidelines:
Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

There are several reasons to follow the rules. Having too many links might be perceived as your page being some kind of "link farm."

The spiders might not make it to the end of a page with too many links. So if you're trading links, your recip partners might not get any benefit being on such a page.

IMO, a link is a link, internal or external. I've seen agents that put all of their state pages on every resource page. For example, in trying to get my resource pages indexed, I put each state page link in my footer on my home page and every resource page. This creates more than 100 total links per page but at least those state page links appear after my partner links. I've seen other sites where the state links appear before partner links, meaning the se spiders go through those links first, possibly not making it to the partner's links, or only getting some. I will start removing these links in the hopes that my state pages will remain indexed without them as I want to follow Googe's guidelines and I want my resource pages to be valuable.

If you are concerned with PR, the more links on a page, the less PR that is given to individual links.

[judyo]

Also not to hijack, but Lydia, both of your links go to the same page?

Not to answer for Lydia, but several members want different anchor text to their site so they use different text for the same page.

[drang3d]

Thanks Judyo that helps me a lot. Does that mean that the maximum your google juice can be divided by is a 100, so theres no penalty for having more than 100 links on a page, it just a PR issue for your linking partners?

DRang3d