Too Many Links Explode Upon Upgrade

[thenorrisgroup]

We upgraded our CMS system in September and then had an explosion of new errors appearing in SEOMOZ.

Most concerning was the too many links area. Our main site is www.thenorrisgroup.com.  Many of the links on the page are set up as no follows and nothing else changed so I don't understand why it's tracking differently all of a sudden. Any ideas?

[KeriMorgret]

Hi Aaron,

Have you been able to sort this out, or are you still looking for some help?

[RyanKent]

You should definitely remove the NoFollow tag. That is a separate issue from the "too many links" warning. I noticed it because you specifically mentioned you had added the NF tag to links.

With respect to the change, it is possible some of your links were previously not crawlable due to the site design. It is also possible your CMS is adding extra links as well. The only way to know for sure is to perform a thorough analysis of all links on the page. SEOmoz shows your home page has 125 links. In my experience the tool is quite accurate.

When I performed a quick scan of the page, I noticed 75 links visually. I would suggest checking the HTML of your home page and account for every link. Either I am missing something or you have a lot of links which are not visible. For example links contained in

<noscript>tags can cause this problem.</p></noscript>

[thenorrisgroup]

I am so discouraged. Why would it change all of a sudden? It was fine and then it just exploded.  Did SEOMOZ change the way they were tracking certain issues?

So bottom line I should take the NF off.

[mjtaylor]

Ryan is correct; you cannot control the flow of PageRank or link juice around your site using the NF attribute, and, in general, it is not a "best SEO practice" to use the nofollow attribute on your own site links. If you would prefer the search engine to not index a page, it is far better to prohibit the crawl of that page via your robots.txt file.

Unless you are selling links (or trying to prohibit spam in blog comments, perhaps) I would not use the nofollow on a site. Why would I put a link on my site that I don't trust? I don't think I want to send that message to Google.

[RyanKent]

Hi Aaron,

A few things to know about your links:

1. The SEOmoz flag for "too many links" on a page is triggered when you offer 101+ links. In reality, there is no magical number whereby 100 links is ok and 101 is bad. It is a judgment call involving numerous factors and can vary per site.

2. Overall I find the number of links offered on your home page to be fine. Your site's DA of 43 can support 125 links if they are all necessary. Your sidebar and content links look good. I would suggest evaluating your navigation menu and footer menu in Google Analytics. There is a tool which allows you to see which links are used and how often. If you find links which are not used (footer links have very low usage normally) then you may wish to consider removing them.

In the end, if you research the matter and determine your links are necessary and valued by visitors then you can leave them and disregard the warning.

3. In your case, the flag is a good thing because it allowed this conversation which will be helpful. Specifically, it is a VERY bad idea to nofollow your internal links in the manner that has happened on your site. Many people think if they "nofollow" a link, the link is ignored by search engines. That is not the case.

Adding the nofollow tag to a link means you do not trust the link. You still lose link juice. It can be confusing so I will share a couple examples:

Case 1 - you offer 100 links on a page. All links are followed. Each link receives roughly 1% of link juice (1/100). In reality there are a couple other factors such as link decay and link location, but they are not relevant to this conversation.

Case 2 - you offer 100 links on a page. 50 links are nofollowed. Each of the remaining links still only receive 1% of link juice (1/100). The 50 nofollow links still have link juice flow to them, but rather then that juice being passed on to the target page, it evaporates.

As a general rule, do not ever no follow any internal links. There can be some minor exceptions but you are far better off never using nofollow on an internal link then ever misusing nofollow on any internal links. For external links, only use nofollow if you do not trust the target site.