Too many on page links

[BeckyKey]

Hi

I know previously it was recommended to stick to under 100 links on the page, but I've run a crawl and mine are over this now with 130+

How important is this now? I've read a few articles to say it's not as crucial as before.

Thanks!

[BlueCorona]

Hi Becky!

First, I would like to say this is it great you are being proactive in making sure your webpage doesn't have too many links on it! But, luckily for you, this is not something you need to worry about. 100 is a suggested number but not something that will penalize you if you go over.

Google’s Matt Cutts posted a video explaining why Google no longer has that 100-links-per-page Webmaster guideline—so be sure to check that out! It's commonly thought that having too many links will negatively impact your SEO results, but that hasn't been the case since 2008. However, Google has said if a site looks to be spammy and has way too many links on a single page—Google reserves the right to take action on the site. So, don't include links that could be seen as spammy and you should be fine.

Check out this Moz blog that discusses how many links is too many for more information!

[BeckyKey]

Thank you for the advice, I'll take a look at the articles

Brilliant, the round table sounds great - I'll sign up for this

[Andy.Drinkwater]

I honestly wouldn't worry Becky. The page looks fine, the links look fine and it is certainly not what you would call spammy,

Link crafting was a 'thing' a number of years ago, but today Google pretty much ignores this, as has been shown many times in testing.

However, you can benefit from internal links, but that is a different discussion. Read this if you are interested.

If you are interested, there is a round-table discussion on eCommerce SEO hosted by SEMrush on Thursday and that could be useful to you? Myself and 2 others will be talking on a number of issues.

-Andy

[BeckyKey]

Thanks for the advice, I've looked into this before.

We have menu links and product links as it's an ecommerce site, so I wouldn't be able to remove any of these.

I've found it hard to find a way to decrease these links further on primary pages. For example http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/aluminium-sack-truck has 130 links.

Any advice would be appreciated

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Confirmation from Google here to limit the links on a page to 3000

https://www.deepcrawl.com/knowledge/news/google-webmaster-hangout-notes-friday-8th-july-2016/

I would consider that to be a lot though

-Andy

[BeckyKey]

Brilliant thank you!

[ThompsonPaul]

In the "old days" (yup, I go back that far), Google's search index crawler wasn't all that powerful. So it would ration itself on each page and simply quit trying to process all the content on the page after a certain number of links and certain character count. (That's also why it used to be VERY important that your content was close to the top of your page code, not buried at the bottom of the code).

The crawler has been beefed up to the point where this hasn't been a limiting factor per page for a long time, so the crawler will traverse pretty well any links you feed it. But I +1 both Andy and Mike's advice about considering the usability and link power dilution of having extensive numbers of links on a page. (This is especially important to consider for your site's primary pages, since one of their main jobs is to help flow their ranking authority down to important/valuable second-level pages.)

Paul

[94501]

Hi Becky,

Beyond the hypothetical limit, would be the consideration of dividing the link authority of the page by a really large number of links and therefor decreasing the relative value of each of those links to the pages they link to.

Depending on the page holding all these links, user experience, purpose of linked-to pages, etcetera, this may or may not be a consideration, but worth thinking about.

Good luck!

• Mike

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Becky,

If the links are justified, don't worry. I have clients with 3-400 and no problems with their positions in Google.

That doesn't mean to say it will be the same case for everyone though - each site is different and sometimes you can have too many, but just think it through and if you come to the conclusion that most of the links aren't needed and are stuffing keywords in, then look to make changes.

But on the whole, it doesn't sound like an issue to me - there are no hard and fast rules around this.

-Andy