Do links count if they have no href parameter?

[Webxtrakt]

A SEOmoz report indicates that we have a large number of links on our pages, mainly due to an embedded mega-drop down and lots of product display options that are user activated, but otherwise hidden.

Most of the links have the paramter href="#", because the links are used in combination with jQuery to trigger actions.

It is still possible to trigger the actions without the href parameter, so the question is:

• Do links without href parameters count towards the total amount of links on the page, since a link without a href parameter is actually an internal page link?

Our site (this version of the site has not had empty tags removed):

http://emilea.be/

[DanHill]

Taken from http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/on-page-keyword-optimization

Avoid Excessive External Links

<dl>

<dt>Explanation</dt>

<dd>Linking externally is generally a good thing, but as with many optimization tactics in SEO, moderation is the best path. Employing a high number of followed external links may prevent the engines from passing much value through any given link and can also trigger potential issues of spam/manipulation (particularly if those links are not pointing to high quality/trustworthy sites).</dd>

<dd>

Avoid Excessive Internal Links

<dl>

<dt>Explanation</dt>

<dd>Employing an excessive quantity of internal-pointing links may not directly harm the value of a page, but it can influence the quanity of link juice sent through those links and dilute it's ability to help get link targets crawled, indexed and ranked.</dd>

<dt>Recommendation</dt>

<dd>Scale down the number of internal links to fewer than 100 (preferrably), and, at a minimum, fewer than 300</dd>

</dl>

</dd>

</dl>

[Webxtrakt]

Thanks for the feedback and the link to the analyser. I ran our production site through the analyser and got:

This tag contains 229 urls. Some Search Engines have problems with more than 100 urls on a page.

However, when I ran the same page on our development site (without empty hrefs) I got:

This tag contains 143 urls. Some Search Engines have problems with more than 100 urls on a page.

Which seems to indicate that removing empty hrefs will decrease the total number of links.

Did I understand correctly that 100 links on a page is not a problem if they are outbound, but it could be an issue if they are inner links, because some might not be picked up?

[DanHill]

I ran your URL through http://www.submitexpress.com/analyzer/  and it picked up 221 links on page/URL's so to answer your question I'd say yes they do.  Although as far as I'm aware having more than 100 links on your page is not a problem, provided that it's 100 or less outbound links and not inner links.

Another thing to comtemplate is that if I turn javascript off I can't navigate your site at all, this might be worth looking into

http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/docs/learn-more.html