Limiting On Page Links
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Right now, we have about 160 or so links on the home page. It's been recommended that we keep it to under 100, though that's not as big of a deal as it once was.
Is it helpful to make a bunch of those links "nofollow" in order to preserve link juice? Is it going to make a difference, or be at all helpful? I assume it won't be harmful, especially as a bunch of them are to the same page but on different sections of the page.
Would live your advice and thoughts! Thanks!
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Brent and Syed are correct - nofollow no longer preserves link-juice. As for the 100-links "rule", it's really just a guideline. I discuss it in depth here:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many
It's really a balancing act - the more links you have, the less love each link gets. It's not just SEOs - it's true for visitors, too (as Ryan pointed out). More options isn't always a good thing.
The trick is that the balance really depends a lot on the site. I've seen sites with 160 links that were well-designed with ample authority to make that work. I've seen others with 80 links where it was a complete mess.
It's also important to note that links to the same Page B on any Page A are discounted by Google - so, if you have a link in the navigation and then a link to that same page in the content and footer, the 2nd and 3rd links are basically ignored. We still count them as part of the 100, but Google doesn't in most cases. It's a little tricky, since Google probably views navigation links differently from contextual (in-page) links, but the rule still generally holds. Only one link to any Page B from Page A is going to get counted.
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Thanks everyone. I really appreciate all your help!
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Making links 'nofollow' to preserve link juice is a thing of the past. As of now, the "link juice" that you think you 'saved' just vanishes into thin air. Meaning, if you do use 'Nofollow' on links, you won't be saving it and passing it on to others.
100 links on page is just a broad suggestion for most websites. Our website have 180 links on homepage and we rank pretty well.
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Even if you make the links nofollow, you will still lose link juice.
Just focus on putting your best links towards the top.
Here is a great post explaining why you still will lose link juice.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-maybe-changes-how-the-pagerank-algorithm-handles-nofollow
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That will be helpful to preserve your link juice, but it won't make the site easier to navigate for your users. Ideally you want a "flat" and "wide" site architecture. Inbound.org recently had an article on this exact topic.
I'm not sure no-following those duplicate links is going to do a whole lot, other than spread your "link juice" more evenly around your site. For example, if 60 of your 160 links are duplicated (meaning theres another link going to a different anchor on the same URL), that means those 60 pages are getting hosed with link juice twice, and your other 40 pages with only 1 link will get half as much of it. If each URL has only 1 followed link from the homepage, then your homepages link juice will flow more or less evenly across all the pages.
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