"Too many on page links" phantom penalty? What about big sites?
-
So I am consistently over the recommended "100 links" rule on our site's pages because of our extensive navigation and plentiful footer links (somewhere around 300 links per page). I know that there is no official penalty for this but rather that it affects the "link juice" of each link on there. I guess my question is more about how places like Zappos and Amazon get away with this? They have WAY over 100 links per page... in fact I think that Zappos footer is 100+ links alone. This overage doesn't seem to affect their domain rankings and authority so why does SEO moz place so much emphasis on this error?
-
I can totally agree with that statement. Perhaps I misspoke. Im not asking for them to set my guidelines but rather just noting that they are pretty certain about drawing that line at 100 with their error reporting as opposed to keeping that line fuzzy like it really is.
-
I cannot speak for SEOMoz, but I personally think one of the reasons they don't tell you what a good range to have is because a lot of it comes down to your site structure as well as authority. Telling people how many they can have based on domain authority, and knowing nothing of site structure, may lead to bad practices.
Like Marcus says above:
"Now, only you can determine what a reasonable amount is for your site. If all pages have tons of authority, then great, but if not, you may want to rethink your navigation. "
-
Thanks for the reply. I guess then my question is... why doesn't SEO moz give you a range of links appropriate for your domain authority? So for example if my domain authority is 35 what range of links would be appropriate... if its 65, likewise what amount of links would be considered permissible? The reason i say range is because i know its not a hard fast rule. Its just hard to see thousands of errors glaring at you every day when in fact they may not be affecting your domain authority like they say.
-
This was a rule from back in the day when Google's advice was not to have more than 100 links per page. The thing is, whilst this exact rule is not really the case now, there is a lot of good reason not to have a link to every page on every page.
If you have this kind of huge navigation
- is it good for users? Will they really navigate through 300 odd links?
- do you really want to evenly distribute page rank across all pages in the site and indicate that each page is equally important?
Also, if all links are not getting crawled, then there is a potential for page rank distribution to be messed up with certain pages not getting anything due to the behemoth navigation.
It's important to note though, this has never been a penalty issue, it is really just a bad internal SEO (and possibly usability) issue.
This is an interesting read:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-manyAlso, you can see Google still recommend that you 'keep the links on a given page to a reasonable amount':
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769#1Now, only you can determine what a reasonable amount is for your site. If all pages have tons of authority, then great, but if not, you may want to rethink your navigation.
Hope this helps
Marcus -
The 100 links thing is more of a general recommendation than a "rule" . The answer could be different from site to site. Back in the day, this was a limit of 100 links crawled per page because Google put a cap on how much they would crawl in order to save some bandwidth.
In current times, this is more about how much domain authority your site has. If you have a lot of links, those are all going to be leeching your PR and they will all get less "juice" as the amount that flows over will keep getting divided.
Sites like Amazon and Zappos have a lot of authority and PR, therefore this is not as big of an issue to them.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Pages with Temporary Redirects on pages that don't exist!
Hi There Another obvious question to some I hope. I ran my first report using the Moz crawler and I have a bunch of pages with temporary redirects as a medium level issue showing up. Trouble is the pages don't exist so they are being redirected to my custom 404 page. So for example I have a URL in the report being called up from lord only knows where!: www.domain.com/pdf/home.aspx This doesn't exist, I have only 1 home.aspx page and it's in the root directory! but it is giving a temp redirect to my 404 page as I would expect but that then leads to a MOZ error as outlined. So basically you could randomize any url up and it would give this error so I am trying to work out how I deal with it before Google starts to notice or before a competitor starts to throw all kinds at my site generating these errors. Any steering on this would be much appreciated!
Moz Pro | | Raptor-crew0 -
Open Site Explorer WAY Off in Terms of Link Profiles?
Hey, One of our websites is www.inspireeducation.net.au. I have noticed although tools like Raventools capture our links well, Open Site Explorer is doing a terrible job... For example the following page >>> http://www.inspireeducation.net.au/courses/training-and-assessment-courses/certificate-iv-in-training-and-assessment/ has many many more than 8 root domains linking, however Open Site Explorer only presents 8? We are finding the same problem for almost any page we review through Open Site. Does anyone have any idea why the numbers would be so out? The new links are NOT fresh links. Many are well-established (been there for years), and even many newer ones have been there for more that 60 days. I find the same thing when reviewing competitor sites.. is Open Site Explorer working properly at all at the moment?
Moz Pro | | love-seo-goodness0 -
My domain authority is 1, and I am not seeing any links to my site.
I know that there are links to my site, but nothing shows up. My website is www.mullinsgeoffrey.com. I have tried with and without the www. I am using wordpress for this site, but competitors are as well, and there authority seems fine. is there a hidden setting somewhere that is screwing things up?
Moz Pro | | mullinsgeoffrey0 -
External Followed Links History, number of links go down
I was reviewing Historical Domain Analysis and found that in last 2 month we lost almost 10000 external followed links. What this could be? is this real or just question seomoz crawling? 30voy1g.jpg
Moz Pro | | ctam0 -
20000 site errors and 10000 pages crawled.
I have recently built an e-commerce website for the company I work at. Its built on opencart. Say for example we have a chair for sale. The url will be: www.domain.com/best-offers/cool-chair Thats fine, seomoz is crawling them all fine and reporting any errors under them url great. On each product listing we have several options and zoom options (allows the user to zoom in to the image to get a more detailed look). When a different zoom type is selected it adds on to the url, so for example: www.domain.com/best-offers/cool-chair?zoom=1 and there are 3 different zoom types. So effectively its taking for urls as different when in fact they are all one url. and Seomoz has interpreted it this way, and crawled 10000 pages(it thinks exist because of this) and thrown up 20000 errors. Does anyone have any idea how to solve this?
Moz Pro | | CompleteOffice0 -
No follow Internal Links
Hello, I am comparing my site with my competitors. According to Open Site Explorer, my site has 541 internal follow links, and a total of 1,286 total internal links, implying I have 745 no follow internal links. I tried to drill into these internal no follow links using the "Inbound Links" report in OSE. But I'm receiving an error stating that No Data is Available for this URL. Does anyone have any insight to this? I'd really like to understand where those no follow links are coming from. Thanks in advance. eh70
Moz Pro | | TheBOTWGuys0 -
How can I reduce the number of links on a page and keep the site easy to navigate?
The SEOmoz Site Crawl indicates that we have too many on page links on over 9,970 pages. This is an ecommerce site with a large number of categories. I have a couple of questions regarding this issue: How important is the "too many on page links" factor to SEO? What are some methods of reducing the number of links when there are a large number of categories? We have main categories with dropdown menus currently and have found that they are used to browse and shop the store.
Moz Pro | | afmaury1 -
Open Site Explorer vs. Linkscape... without mozRank passed how do you measure link value?
Hi all, Since Linkscape was retired we've been struggling without the mozRank passed data for our competitor research. However, I've read that it wasn't a particularly reliable metric to go on so my question is: what makes a link more valuable, in your opinion? I'm trying to work out the relation between Page Authority / Domain Authority / Number of Links etc., ideally to come up with some form of ranking system where we can say: Overall link value = ( (A x Page Authority) x (B x Domain Authority) x (C x Number of Links) ) / Number of Linking Domains or something like that. Is this a good way to go about it? What do you guys look at when using the OSE data? Thanks in advance for your help!
Moz Pro | | OmarKattan0