Too many links - How to address without removing them?

[DavidSpivac]

Hi,

When a page has too many links (over 100) due to the number of monthly blog archives for example, is it possible to use a code (like no index but just for one link)  that would prevent Google from counting the link? Or not in which case the only options would be to leave the extra links or to delete them.

I do not want to put a no index at the page level but more at link level by preventing SE to follow the least important links but keeping them active for users.

Thank you,

David

[Dr-Pete]

The short answer is "no". There's no safe way (i.e. that doesn't look like cloaking) to NOINDEX just a few links, and nofollow doesn't work for internal PR-sculpting anymore.

When you're talking about something like an archive - a long list of resources - I wouldn't get too hung up on it. It's really an issue of balance. If every page on your site has 200 navigation links, you're spreading yourself really thin. If one page of your site references 100 blog posts in a list, that's pretty natural. You could paginate that list and use rel=prev/next or something like that, but there's always a trade-off (the first page would probably pass more PR and the later pages less).

The other option would be to have two archives - A Top 25/50/etc. that has the posts you most want to pass internal PR to, and then link that to an archive with everything. That would give the main posts more prominence.

Always a bit hard to say without seeing the site/page, but in this case, I don't think I'd lose sleep over it.

[josh-riley]

Agree. Also, too many links isn't as a big of a deal as it used to be. If Google even thinks there's a link there, they will try to crawl it or make the connection anyway.

[NakulGoyal]

I would look at it from a different perspective. I would ask myself whether user's are using those monthly archives and if not, just get rid of them. From what you are trying to do, the noindex or nofollow tag won't do it unfortunately.