Too Many On-Page Links: Crawl Diag vs On-Page

[icecarats]

I've got a site I'm optimizing that has thousands of 'too many links on-page' warnings from the SeoMoz crawl diagnostic. I've been in there and realized that there are indeed, the rent is too damned high, and it's due to a header/left/footer category menu that's repeating itself. So I changed these links to NoFollow, cutting my total links by about 50 per page.

I was too impatient to wait for a new crawl, so I used the On Page Reports to see if anything would come up on the Internal Link Count/External Link Count factors, and nothing did. However, the crawl (eventually) came back with the same warning. I looked at the link Count in the crawl details, and realized that it's basically counting every single '<a href'="" on="" the="" page.="" because="" of="" this,="" i="" guess="" my="" questions="" are="" twofold:<="" p=""></a>

<a href'="" on="" the="" page.="" because="" of="" this,="" i="" guess="" my="" questions="" are="" twofold:<="" p="">1. Is no-follow a valid strategy to reduce link count for a page? (Obviously not for SeoMoz crawler, but for Google)</a>

<a href'="" on="" the="" page.="" because="" of="" this,="" i="" guess="" my="" questions="" are="" twofold:<="" p="">2. What metric does the On-Page Report use to determine if there are too many Internal/External links?

Apologies if this has been asked, the search didn't seem to come up with anything specific to this.</a>

[Dryope]

Now that nofollow links are "evaporating" PageRank, to use Google's terminology, I think you have to count them as normal links.

No-follow or follow link doesnt important you need to count all links.

On-Page Report only count page link.

[EricaMcGillivray]

To answer #1, yes, no-follow is the valid strategy to reduce link count for a page.

For #2, I'm not sure, but we'll get an answer for you.