Too many on page links - created by filters

[jake372]

I have an ecommerce site and SEOmoz "Crawl Diagnostics Summary"  points out that I have too many hyperlinks on most of my pages.

The most recent thing I've done that could  the culprit is the creation of number product filters.  Each filter I put on the page is creating a hyperlink off that page.  As an example, there's a filter available for manufacturers.  Under that, there are 8 new filter links, thus new hyperlinks.  On one category there are 60 new links created because of filters.

I feel like these filters have made the user experience on the site better BUT has dramatically increased the number of outbound links off the page.  I know keeping it to under 100 is a rule-of-thumb but at the same time there must be some validity to trying to limit them.

Do you have any recommendation on how I can "have my cake and eat it too?"

Thanks for any help!

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Jake,

Thanks for the question.

First off, I highly recommend reading this article by Dr. Pete: How Many Links are Too Many? (he get's asked this question a lot!)

Short answer: over 100 links isn't necessarily bad. If you're consolidating those links via rel=canonical Google is likely doing this in their crawl, and therefor reducing the crawling of every single URL in order to save bandwidth. If those pages rel canonical to each other, you may not have a problem. I would recommend checking your parameter settings in Google Webmaster Tools, just to be safe.

That said, I've often found that reducing the number of links on a page often improves user experience. There's a certain psychology around limiting choices that makes decisions easier for users. I'm not saying this is right for your situation, but it's always best to question your assumptions.

Cheers.

[jake372]

Hi Irving,

First, thanks for your comments.  No, I am using a custom, in house CMS, not Magento.

My terminology was mistaken.  I was calling these outbound links but SEOMoz is basically labeling them in a warning label:

"  Issue: Too Many On-Page Links" and that I need to limit them to 100 or less.

-I do have canonical tags setup for each of these filter pages but are you saying I also need to handle that inside WMTs also?

-Although these links are hyperlinks to internal pages, in the sense they are outbound relative to the specific page but point to Dynamically created pages one the same site, should I not worry about them?    I just cannot think of "above the board" way to show these to the user but not have them hurt me from the big G's perspective.

I have a quick capture attached:

Thanks,
Jason

sY75F6l.jpg

[irvingw]

you're using magento i take it

by outbound link you mean links to another website? if you don't mean that then it's ok - the filter URLs are parameters being appended so you need to address them in the parameter handling section of WMT to tell Google not to index them as individual pages or you will be creating a duplicate content issue.

add canonical tags too, to tell Google only index the main page, not the appended filter URLs