Webpage with around 200+ inter links per page

[Prestige-SEO]

HI,

I have a client that I recently took on and I run a SEOmoz crawl on the website and a minor error was that ..

1. web pages have more than 200+ interlinks, reason for this is becuase the client offers a service to every place in the world and then has links to contact us/about us etc those kind of pages. is this something we need to strongly avoid?

2. The title tags are all over the suggested amount by 1/2 letters. - again is this really bad?

[Prestige-SEO]

Hi, I admit, it does sounds spammy but the way it's been designed its not really as it's like a drop down list and not just a straight list of 200 blue ugly URLs lol. Thanks for your time

[Ecreativeworks]

That sounds really spammy, but honestly if they have top 5 rankings for all of those I wouldn't remove them. I would work very hard to make sure it looks as least spammy as possible (well, as good as a list of 200 links at the bottom of your content could possibly look), since that's something that could seriously hurt your conversions & bounce rate.

Then I'd try doing a test with a few of the pages and see what happens to your conversion rates when all those links are removed -- if it makes a positive impact, then consider removing them across the site, but watch what happens to all those ranking very carefully.

It's worth noting that it's possible those links aren't doing a whole lot, because with so many links the juice from each link is much lower. But of course even with a very small benefit if there are enough of them they all add up.

[Prestige-SEO]

Thanks for this reply, On the inner pages, they have for example... "weddings in Spain" And then have the unique content and at the bottom of the content have 200+ links to all the other locations, they already have more or less top 5 rankings for all the country's, do you think it's worth messing round with the structure or just build more links?

[Ecreativeworks]

Having 200+ links per page is sub-optimal from an SEO perspective, but will not trigger any kind of penalty, if that's what you're concerned about. The PageRank that is passed through links is divided by the number of links, so with 200 links per page, each of those linked pages is getting far less PageRank (you can get a general comparative idea of how much with this tool: http://www.ecreativeim.com/pagerank-link-juice-calculator.php). So having too many links just dilutes the value of each link, but doesn't necessarily raise a spam flag or anything.

As an example, I recently had a client where we dropped their global navigation from 176 or so links down to less than 90 links, and they saw rankings boosts to every single important keyword (and of course the landing pages for those keywords were still in the global nav). One ranking went from 30+ to 8, though most gains were about 10 rankings for poor ranking keywords and 3 rankings for bottom of first page keywords.

As for the title tags, I would be far more concerned about title tags that are half again as long as their maximum -- usually every time I see that it turns out the title tags are also crazily keyword stuffed (a possible spam signal). I would certainly prioritize getting those title tags down into shape.

I'd also suggest moving to a more hierarchical structure for the global navigation -- perhaps linking to one contact page, and have that page link out to the hundreds of different regions?