Too Many On-Page Links

[petewinter]

Most of my pages have "Too Many On-Page Links".

If you view the website you will see this is mainly down to the top navigation drop down menu: http://www.cwesolutions.co.uk

So if I wanted to reduce the number of links I would have to have category links with landing pages.

How much does having "Too Many On-Page Links" effect my website ranking? Is it really important and would I notice a difference if I changed it?

[zigojacko]

In the sense that a report is alerting that there are too many links on a page though is going to be because it is warning of authority leakage more than anything else though.

Granted, the insertion of 'just' in my previous statement probably misleads...

I agree though that if you were to link every page to every page, it would just cause a royal headache to crawlers - why one would do that though is beyond me.

[zigojacko]

Sorry Pete, that was a typo where I meant to say 'internal linkage is classed differently as external linkage' (I've amended my reply).

[DWJames]

To say "linking just dilutes the authority from the page" is not strictly true.

In this particular instance I do not believe that the menu is too OTT in terms of links but if you have every page linking to every page you just end up creating a mesh of links that search engines can waste crawl time trying to decipher.

Too many links with poor structure can mean that your crawl allocation is wasted which results in less of your pages being indexed properly.

[petewinter]

Thanks Geoff, but want did you mean here...

Internal linkage is classed differently as internal linkage?

[zigojacko]

What makes you think you have too many on page links? Internal linkage is classed differently as external linkage, linking just dilutes the authority from the page (amongst other crawlability and usability factors), but if it's internal linkage, at least the authority is kept on your domain.

Simple, effective and easy to use navigation is critical to website usability and will have an affect on performance in search engines. In your example, I wouldn't expect any negative ranking affects to occur as a result of the style of navigation menu your website utilises. If that is deemed most useful for your customers, then that's the best approach.

[zigojacko]

Use a tool such as SEOmoz' Crawl Test or Xenu's Link Sleuth to determine any crawling issues. There are a number of free online tools for this too.

[petewinter]

Thanks for your reply and explanation. One more question... How would I know if the bots are having a problem crawling my website?

[BrianSaxon]

Too many links on a page can make it difficult for bots to crawl your site.  If you have over 100 links on page, make certain you have a sitemap that lays out a road map for the bots.

If your site is being effectively crawled, don't worry about it.  I would worry if the linking structure is impacting the user experience or if deeper pages weren't getting crawled.