As Internet marketers, we know that too many links on a webpage can harm conversions. Well, they can also harm the ability for a page to rank in the search engines.

Writing in Search Marketing Standard, Rebecca Appleton points out that, as a rule of thumb, a webpage shouldn’t contain more than 100 outbound links. This is based on Google’s old recommendation that links be kept to below 100 links to ensure its spiders indexed pages effectively.

According to Rebecca, search engines may tend to regard pages with more than 100 links as spammy and therefore attribute lower page quality to such pages.

And although Google (or another search engine) won’t necessarily regard such pages as low-quality, the spiders may simply not follow all the links – and consequently not pass on authority or ‘link juice’ – to other pages. This pretty much renders the SEO value of such links useless.

One-hundred links may seem like an awful lot of links to have on one page, but it’s entirely possible on all kinds of webpages, especially catalog style pages on ecommerce sites and web directory pages containing lists of links.

So what’s the solution? The short answer is to avoid having more than 100 links on a given webpage. If necessary, split pages into two or more, so that each contains fewer than 100.

Oh, and it bears repeating: you’re typically better off having fewer links on a webpage anyway, since this reduces ‘choice’ and, depending on your objectives, boosts conversions.

Source: Rebecca Appleton, “Are Too Many Links Damaging Your Search Position?” Search Marketing Standard, October 13, 2009

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 29th, 2009 at 6:34 am and is filed under Kikabink Lab, Search Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.