The following page contains the Google Webmaster Guidelines:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

This page states "Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100)."

I have always tried to avoid exchanging links with sites that do not adhere to this guideline. However, since exchanging links several sites, they have expanded their links pages such that they no longer adhere to this guideline.

Does anyone here think that I should pull my links to these sites?

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Sincerely,

Ted Amenta
Breckneridge Real Estate Agent
For Breckenridge Real Estate in Breckenridge Colorado visit www.amenta.com.

Hi Ted,

I know that google "says" keep it fewer than 100 links. But I believe that the fewer links you're competing with, the better. Personally, I don't like to be on a page that has more than 40-50 links. The page's "vote" is divided up amongst all the links on that page and you'll receive less of a vote with more links.

However, also consider that if the page has a strong ranking, the amount of links has already been factored into that ranking equation. For example, if I had a page rank 5 page that had 60 links on it, then I'd know that it's a very strong page to be able to support that many outbound links. However, more frequently, you'll notice that pages with many links will usually have a low page rank, as it bleeds out to all the outbound links. In this case, page rank does serve as a good indicator of the strength of the page relative to the outbound links.

Anyway .. I don't claim that this is "the one true and correct answer", but everything we're ever told is really based on speculation, trial and error.

...hope that helps..And if you'd like to exchange links, please let me know!

-- Link info --------------------------
URL: http://www.rentspeed.com/
Anchor/Title: Houses For Rent
Desc: Search for a rental home, condo, apartment, or townhouse. Property managers - Add a free home rental listing!

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Houses for Rent at rentspeed.com!

Rental Homes at rentspeed.com!

Nevermind that link exchange request .. We're already partners!

Heh heh ..

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Houses for Rent at rentspeed.com!

Rental Homes at rentspeed.com!

I realize more than a few people believe this but I'm not one of them.

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Mobile Homes For Sale in Arizona ~ Sales Training ~ Mobile Homes For Sale

Pagerank does not "bleed" - When a page passes pagerank to its links, it also retains it's original pagerank. Confusing at first I know, but here is how it works.

Page A Has 100 weight points (We are choosing .85 as an arbitrary dampening factor in the algo) Thus it can pass on 85 weight points (Technically 85.15 but we dont care about the .15 at this point)

If page A has one link on it, it will pass 85 weight points to the page it links to.
If page A has ten links on it, it will pass 8.5 weight points to each.

In either situation after linking out page A still retains it's 100 weight points after the link out.

This is a function of the Prt1/Ct1 in the algorithm Where Prt1 = 100 (the weight the page has) and Ct1 = the # of outbound links on that page.

What you do lose is the opportunity to pass as much weight to your internal pages from that page with 100 weight points, but lets be honest, you pretty much write off the PR of your links pages when you create them anyways as they are meant to donate what they have to others, in hopes that others are of like mind.

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Want to save up to 50% off Real estate webmasters product websites & common upgrades? Check out my latest blog post regarding our end of the year sale.

Thanks for the explanation. I still have to say that in my experience in seeing page rank move up and down, I'm convinced that having more links on a page does in fact decrease your page's rank.

Here's one reason why I'm sold on this: I have a site with a resources page, that has about 50 links on it. We noticed that this was the only page on the entire site that had no page rank, and we had no idea why. Much like the other pages on the site, the resources page was linked directly from the home page. All the other pages were 3's and 4's, but this page was a zero. Upon removal of the links, we noticed that on the next PR update we immediately went up several points in rank, from a zero.

Not only this, but overall, I have noticed that generally pages with more links have less page rank, while the ones with the most page rank have fewer links listed. I'm open to your explanation, and I do hope you're right about that. I'll have to research this subject more.

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Houses for Rent at rentspeed.com!

Rental Homes at rentspeed.com!

Well I didn't say that Google can't detect links pages for what they are and devalue them, I was speaking "just" about the pagerank algorithm, there are many other algo's in place to combat search engine tampering. If you look at a quality resource with the equal amount of links (Non reciprocal - to sites that were there just to be a benefit to a user) you will see that they pagerank is not effected by outbound linking.

How many PR 0 pages are there on dmoz? It doesnt get preferential treatment, its just a good resource site.

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Want to save up to 50% off Real estate webmasters product websites & common upgrades? Check out my latest blog post regarding our end of the year sale.

I suppose I could offer some advise sitting here being mr know it all lol - I would write content (Unique content) for above and below your link parnters unique to each page. I would then make sure each links page also was organized into relevant groups, had its own title and description, and incorporated the same site navigation as the rest of your site.

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Want to save up to 50% off Real estate webmasters product websites & common upgrades? Check out my latest blog post regarding our end of the year sale.

Take a look at this page rentspeed.com/affiliates/ and then click through your states, no unique anything, titles, content descriptions nada - give em some content they will get a better look from the spiders.

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Want to save up to 50% off Real estate webmasters product websites & common upgrades? Check out my latest blog post regarding our end of the year sale.

Ted,

I've had the same problem, particularly with some z57 sites. I've gone back and found one guy who stuffed over 1300 BLs on his exchange page. Another agent with a z57 site had over 600. I removed my links to them and emailed them to explain why and to ask that they remove their links to me.