Too many on page links

[KateGMaker]

Yes this question again. I know it get's asked a lot and I know of a few fixes, but this one I'm having a problem with.

So we have a fan gallery on our site which is not only causing duplicate page titles, which I'm thinking we can fix with a canonical, but also too many on page links.

The issue is this is on drupal which I have very little experience with and it seems to just be located within the fan galleries section of the site. After looking at a few things I know that no-follow wont be an option since from what I read it wont really work anyway so I was wondering if anyone else has an asnwer.

I just read through a million articles trying to find a simular situation and can't seem to find anyone with the same thing. It might have something to do with the plugins the programmers used, but my inexperience with drupal is making this difficult.

Thanks guys.

[MagicDude4Eva]

I love Ray's work

I would honestly not worry too much about the too many page-links. The only issue you will run into is that search engines will not crawl all your content. This you can fix with sitemaps to hint what should be crawled.

You can also hint certain links with "noindex/nofollow" based on what you would like to hint to be indexed/crawled.

The duplicate titles could be fixed by making the title unqiue - either by appending a pageNo or something unique about the page (a username, a date, a title with a category etc).

The canonicals make sense where you have cases where different URLs result in the same page being displayed.

[KateGMaker]

What about user profiles in terms of meta descriptions? I was considering just blocking the user profiles because otherwise all of our pages have descriptions, but also I'm not too concerned about user profiles in the SERPs. I wonder what other opinions are on this because I haven't seen a lot of talk of people talking about sites with user profiles and how they use them on their sites.

[KateGMaker]

You're right I guess I'll leave it unless something happens where it does effect the page. I don't think it should hurt our page ranks anyway we get a lot of social shares on the site because of the person whose site is so hopefully when or if the algorithm does change we will already be optimized for it. I just want to make sure the site is cleaned up as much as possible.

[KateGMaker]

Thanks,

Yes I did read about the Matt Cutts blog mentioning that. The problem with the duplicate titles is they are the same pages with duplicate content so in that case the canonical would make sense because it's literally the same page with the same content and the same title so if the duplicate content is no longer searchable then I was thinking the duplicate titles should also get taken care of in that case or am I wrong on that one?

Most of the issues are coming from the fact that that we do take user submitted content in and put it into a searchable gallery and this has caused some pagination issues, but we already took care of most of those now I just have to get rid of the 404's that are coming from the user accounts.

[Adam.Whittles]

Hi Kate,

Firstly, what do you mean by 'we can fix with a canonical'? If you are trying to solve the issue of duplicate page titles then I'm afraid you can't simply fix this with a canonical tag as this is not what it is designed for. The canonical tag is a way of informing search engines of your preferred version of a group of similar pages. It effectively acts like a 301 redirect. You will essentially be telling google not to index these pages, which unless you have a duplicate content issue, is not what you want to achieve.

The only way to fix the issue of duplicate page titles is to give each page a unique and descriptive title. If using a CMS, you can generate a template that will help to avoid getting duplicate titles.

Secondly, why do you think you have too many links on the page? You may find this blog post by Matt Cutts helpful. In it he explains that keeping links on a page to a maximum of 100 is only a rough guideline. The target was set primarily from a design and user perspective. In other words, if it makes sense to have more than 100 links on a page and it doesn't harm the overall user experience, you shouldn't worry.

Hope that helps,

Adam.

[JaredMumford]

The user content links are the ones that are putting you 'over the threshold' - just as would be the case if those were products on an ecomm site - in my opinion I would completely disregard that warning for the paginated pages.

[KateGMaker]

The paginated pages. User submitted pages seem to have been taken care of, but I wasn't sure if I should fix it or not because your right I also saw that it doesn't effect the pages rankings as much, but I wonder if it would be a good idea to fix it anyway.

[JaredMumford]

I wouldn't be too concerned about this error (or more specifically 'warning'). What pages are specifically getting them, the separate user submission pages or the paginated pages?

I've had a lot of ecomm clients who have 30 products listed per page, along with collapsible menus that show all of the 'hidden' links in the source, and have not seen any negative effects from this.

Curious on other opinions here.