Do I really have too many links on my startpage?

[CatfishTPA]

My site www.poker-coaching.net is built with Joomla, and I have one main menu that links all articles (app. 120) in one language from the start page. The site has a language selection menu with translations available in 4 other languages, and for each language, there are another 80 articles linked from the main page.

The SEOMOZ crawling report now say that I have too many links from the main page.

I always thought it was a good thing for SEO to have articles linked from the main page - do I need to restructure my site and start building multi-level menu structures, where I would have a main menu on the start page and the next level menu would only be shown after a user clicks on a main menu item?

[Dr-Pete]

It's complicated, but Istvan hit the core point. More links per page means each link gets less link-juice. Of course, it also means that more pages get link-juice, so it's a balancing act. I wrote about the "100 link rule" last year:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many

There's no one "right" number, and 100 isn't a hard cut-off, it's just a matter of prioritizing. I am worried that your link menus with long article names aren't very user-friendly. I'm guess that people just use the main menus and don't navigate the drop-downs. From an SEO perspective, you might be better driving link-juice to your top 10-20 articles and keeping the main navigation simpler. Again, it's a trade-off, and it really depends on your strategy, domain authority, and the relative value of these pages.

[Keszi]

Hi Catfish,

The thing with the number of links is that usually having a lot of links on one site can devalue the "juice" that the article pages get from the fact that you are linking to them. I am always trying to keep the number of links on one page below 50 if that is possible, since then we target our audience better to targeted pages (and it is less confusing for the visitors).

I hope that helped,

Istvan