Does Google count links on a page or destination URLs?

[SureFire]

Google advises that sites should have no more than around 100 links per page.  I realise there is some flexibility around this which is highlighted in this article:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/questions-answers-with-googles-spam-guru

One of Google's justifications for this guideline is that a page with several hundred links is likely to be less useful to a user.

However, these days web pages are rarely 2 dimensional and usually include CSS drop--down navigation and tabs to different layers so that even though a user may only see 60 or so links, the source code actually contains hundreds of links. I.e., the page is actually very useful to a user.

I think there is a concern amongst SEO's that if there are more than 100ish links on a page search engines may not follow links beyond those which may lead to indexing problems.

This is a long winded way of getting round to my question which is, if there are 200 links in a page but many of these links point to the same page URL (let's say half the links are simply second ocurrences of other links on the page), will Google count 200 links on the page or 100?

[KeriMorgret]

Mark, did these responses answer your question?

[Getz.pro]

Google will only count the first instance of the link as Barry has pointed out. If you link to the same page, but different sections on that page, the # out the link.

Link: Link Text

Anchor on the page: <a name="anchor-on-pagee">Link Description</a>

SEOmoz has some blogs on this also.

[StalkerB]

So top nav and sidebar nav duplicates for example.

Hard to tell; generally Google will only count anchor text of the first link to a certain page - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/results-of-google-experimentation-only-the-first-anchor-text-counts - so we could surmise that the second example on a page definitely isn't counted as a full link.

Also here's some info from a recent YouMOZ post - http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/the-nature-of-the-100link-limit-of-google

I also think Google can often differentiate repeated nav links and doesn't value them as much, but I don't have anything to back that up with.

Basically, I think you'll be alright as Google will filter them before deciding which to crawl.