What is the effect of too many internal links on a page?

[bodaclick]

Hi there! We have been doing a great effort during the last year but our main competitor is still above us in search rankings. Basically, the main differente remains now in the number of internal links, specially in our homepage. We have more than 200 and they only have around 100, so I think we are wasting too much link power among some irrelevant pages. What could be the effect of this?

[EGOL]

I think that I would use the homepage to promote my most profitable, most brandable and most linkable content.  After adopting that philosophy I would increase/decrease the number of links on my homepage to see what produces the most visitor engagement and conversions.

But, getting to your original question... if you are getting your butt kicked in the SERPs you need to go out after links and likes and produce more of the content that attracts them.  SEO is a battle of resources and those resources are linkable content and links/likes, etc.

[StalkerB]

Then you're effectively dividing your link juice much more than they are. This is mostly still relevant - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-juice-is-loose

Edit - Wait I take that back, using nofollow to sculpt page rank isn't a recommendation I would give. It still works a bit but I simply want you to watch that video and understand how link juice flows around a site.

Some things you may want to try are to reduce the number of links and only have converting or money making pages linked to from the home page and building links from other sites directly into the subpages.

Building links directly into subpages should have the greatest effect.

Edit - But please don't just chop off links without thinking about it, take some time to work out how you want Googlebot and visitors to move around your site and make sure that you still have links into ALL the pages on your site (but not necessarily from the homepage).

Also, check if all the subpages are being cached regularly, if not then it's probably a fair assumption Google's not working it's way through all your links.

[bodaclick]

If I did understand well, that's exactly what is happening. We're outranking them for the most important keyword for our homepage (which is the same keyword for them) but they're beating us up in all deeper pages - even if we have a very similar structure...

And our domain and homepage has a better link profile than theirs according to Open Site Explorer.

[saibose]

I think that 100 links is just a guideline rather than a hard rule. I believe that your most relevant links, your sitemap index and other indispensible links should be only placed on the homepage. The idea of the homepage is to have links leading to the most important links to your next level of links (category links). If you have a page with more than 100 links means that you have a bad hiearchy in terms of Google. I wouldnt advocate it.

[StalkerB]

If I can just add a thought for you as well, assuming your homepage is the one ranking for the keyword that your competitor is beating you on, the PR isn't being distributed until AFTER the link juice is being accounted for, i.e. The homepage still has 50 linkjuice points (I just made that up) which are split between 200 links vs your competitors 50 LJP (but I'm going to keep using it) being split among 100 links; basically the ranking factor of the links should only occur further down your site structure.

What may be a factor with those links is whether you're linking off the page with your main keyword to a subpage. So if you want your homepage to rank for 'keyword' having an exact match anchor link with the text 'keyword' may have some effect.

[baptisteplace]

Hi Candida,

The link juice of the homepage is splitted between the 200 links of the page, SEOMoz recommends about 100 links per page. This may not be the cause of the ranking difference, but you should consider removing the links to the less important pages.

If you wish to make a more important change to your linking architecture, you should follow a pyramidal architecture as described in several seomoz articles :

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/internal-link

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/diagrams-for-solving-crawl-priority-indexation-issues

[wissamdandan]

Hi Candida,

Long time ago Google was recommending 100 Links per page and it was one of their Guidelines, But they don't anymore. (Matt Cutts Reference it in this Video here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6g5hoBYlf0)

Try to audit your 200 links and see if all the links are important and adds value to your visitor. but IMO i don't think there is an effect of you having 100 or 200 links more in consideration of your SERPs.

Try to use Linkscape and see your competitor links, and try to pull and acquire the most relevant links linking to your competitor.

Cheers