Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Too many on page links
-
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!
-
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!
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
Brilliant thank you!
-
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
-
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
-
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
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
So many links from single site?
this guy is ranking on all high volume keywords and has low quality content, he has 1600 ref domains check the attachment how did he get so many links from single site is he gonna be penalized YD2BvQ0
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SIMON-CULL0 -
Would You Redirect a Page if the Parent Page was Redirected?
Hi everyone! Let's use this as an example URL: https://www.example.com/marvel/avengers/hulk/ We have done a 301 redirect for the "Avengers" page to another page on the site. Sibling pages of the "Hulk" page live off "marvel" now (ex: /marvel/thor/ and /marvel/iron-man/). Is there any benefit in doing a 301 for the "Hulk" page to live at /marvel/hulk/ like it's sibling pages? Is there any harm long-term in leaving the "Hulk" page under a permanently redirected page? Thank you! Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | amag0 -
Top hierarchy pages vs footer links vs header links
Hi All, We want to change some of the linking structure on our website. I think we are repeating some non-important pages at footer menu. So I want to move them as second hierarchy level pages and bring some important pages at footer menu. But I have confusion which pages will get more influence: Top menu or bottom menu or normal pages? What is the best place to link non-important pages; so the link juice will not get diluted by passing through these. And what is the right place for "keyword-pages" which must influence our rankings for such keywords? Again one thing to notice here is we cannot highlight pages which are created in keyword perspective in top menu. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Substantial difference between Number of Indexed Pages and Sitemap Pages
Hey there, I am doing a website audit at the moment. I've notices substantial differences in the number of pages indexed (search console), the number of pages in the sitemap and the number I am getting when I crawl the page with screamingfrog (see below). Would those discrepancies concern you? The website and its rankings seems fine otherwise. Total indexed: 2,360 (Search Consule)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Online-Marketing-Guy
About 2,920 results (Google search "site:example.com")
Sitemap: 1,229 URLs
Screemingfrog Spider: 1,352 URLs Cheers,
Jochen0 -
Date of page first indexed or age of a page?
Hi does anyone know any ways, tools to find when a page was first indexed/cached by Google? I remember a while back, around 2009 i had a firefox plugin which could check this, and gave you a exact date. Maybe this has changed since. I don't remember the plugin. Or any recommendations on finding the age of a page (not domain) for a website? This is for competitor research not my own website. Cheers, Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MBASydney0 -
Can too many "noindex" pages compared to "index" pages be a problem?
Hello, I have a question for you: our website virtualsheetmusic.com includes thousands of product pages, and due to Panda penalties in the past, we have no-indexed most of the product pages hoping in a sort of recovery (not yet seen though!). So, currently we have about 4,000 "index" page compared to about 80,000 "noindex" pages. Now, we plan to add additional 100,000 new product pages from a new publisher to offer our customers more music choice, and these new pages will still be marked as "noindex, follow". At the end of the integration process, we will end up having something like 180,000 "noindex, follow" pages compared to about 4,000 "index, follow" pages. Here is my question: can this huge discrepancy between 180,000 "noindex" pages and 4,000 "index" pages be a problem? Can this kind of scenario have or cause any negative effect on our current natural SEs profile? or is this something that doesn't actually matter? Any thoughts on this issue are very welcome. Thank you! Fabrizio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Is it better "nofollow" or "follow" links to external social pages?
Hello, I have four outbound links from my site home page taking users to join us on our social Network pages (Twitter, FB, YT and Google+). if you look at my site home page, you can find those 4 links as 4 large buttons on the right column of the page: http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/ Here is my question: do you think it is better for me to add the rel="nofollow" directive to those 4 links or allow Google to follow? From a PR prospective, I am sure that would be better to apply the nofollow tag, but I would like Google to understand that we have a presence on those 4 social channels and to make clearly a correlation between our official website and our official social channels (and then to let Google understand that our social channels are legitimate and related to us), but I am afraid the nofollow directive could prevent that. What's the best move in this case? What do you suggest to do? Maybe the nofollow is irrelevant to allow Google to correlate our website to our legitimate social channels, but I am not sure about that. Any suggestions are very welcome. Thank you in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau9 -
Site wide footer links vs. single link for websites we design
I’ve been running a web design business for the past 5 years, 90% or more of the websites we build have a “web design by” link in the footer which links back to us using just our brand name or the full “web design by brand name” anchor text. I’m fully aware that site-wide footer links arent doing me much good in terms of SEO, but what Im curious to know is could they be hurting me? More specifically I’m wondering if I should do anything about the existing links or change my ways for all new projects, currently we’re still rolling them out with the site-wide footer links. I know that all other things being equal (1 link from 10 domains > 10 links from 1 domain) but is (1 link from 10 domains > 100 links from 10 domains)? I’ve got a lot of branded anchor text, which balances out my exact match and partial match keyword anchors from other link building nicely. Another thing to consider is that we host many of our clients which means there are quite a few on the same server with a shared IP. Should I? 1.) Go back into as many of the sites as I can and remove the link from all pages except the home page or a decent PA sub page- keeping a single link from the domain. 2.) Leave all the old stuff alone but start using the single link method on new sites. 3.) Scratch the site credit and just insert an exact-match anchor link in the body of the home page and hide with with CSS like my top competitor seems to be doing quite successfully. (kidding of course.... but my competitor really is doing this.)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nbeske0
