Pages with more than 100 links
November 20th, 2008 by 
admin
Here Im thinking of some link exchange issues:
Would a site be penalised by being a on page with more that 100 links on it ?
What are the implications ?
Not really penalized but the quality signal of the page may be diminished. Many users find it very difficult and annoying to navigate through hundreds of links. Google is pretty clear on this too…
Just for the record, we can process more than 100 links per page :-). We do however recommend the limit of 100 because it generally makes sense for users (and search engines).
It has been written in their guidelines and has become a reference point for topics such as this. Yes, I know, there are plenty of sites doing just fine with 500+ links on their pages. They most likely have the authority and PR to get away with it. A smaller site with a large number of on page links may have some challenges trying to distribute its minimal PR.
What type of links are we referring to? On site and off site? Or both?
I’m confused on this point as well. A sub-page on one of my sites has 139 links. Ranked pretty good until 120. After that the giggly spider came back less often.
That said, the page has grown and can be split, and that is for the convenience of visitors (just makes sense). Just haven’t gotten around to that. When I do, which will be soon, I’ll let you know. No problems with indexing (that I can see) but the FREQUENCY of updates has gone south.
Is there a “100″ rule out there we should be watching?
Only the one that I’ve seen in Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Other than that, it is open for interpretation or misinterpretation. 
I believe it is all relative. Larger sites tend to have a larger number of links per page. I don’t know what the calculations may be but common sense tells me that if I have a 10 page site and have hundreds of links all over the place, things are going to be out of whack.
We’ve had discussions here on internal navigation systems and how “overloading” them with links can be a detriment to indexing in some instances. If you have a site and it doesn’t have the link equity to pass amongst that many links, things are going to be challenging. Your best option may be to serve section specific menus with a link to all primary sections always visible. Once the visitor arrives in that section then the menu is specific to that.
I’ve found more challenges with the “link overloading” issue on websites. I mean, people tend to put entire sitemaps in their navigation. I don’t think this is a best practice. I’m more for specifics. Give the visitor the top levels at all times and then let then drill down once inside one of those levels. Not from every page of the site.
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