Link juice and max number of links clarification

[sprynewmedia]

I understand roughly that "Link Juice" is passed by dividing PR by the number of links on a page.  I also understand the juice available is reduced by some portion on each iteration.

• 50 PR page
• 10 links on page
• 5 * .9 = 4.5 PR goes to each link.

Correct?

If so and knowing Google stops counting links somewhere around 100, how would it impact the flow to have over 100 links?

IE

• 50 PR page
• 150 links on the page
• .33 *.9 = .29PR to each link BUT only for 100 of them.

After that, the juice is just lost?

Also, I assume Google, to the best of its ability, organizes the links in order of importance such that content links are counted before footer links etc.

[mememax]

As always in the SEO industry, there's no right answer for any particular case but I think you got a really structured approach to it. It would be great to know the results of your experiment. This could be a really good article in the seomoz community, let me know how it goes!

[sprynewmedia]

Agreed, the extreme repetition of the brand keywords and anchor text was one of my first arguments for dropping the section.

Think, from everything I've read so far, there appears to be an additional juice loss at one point but it would highly dependent on the trust of the page and the nature of the links. Certainly not a strong enough correlation to make part of my case however.

[mememax]

I think that the link #102 may have the same value of link #35, I don't think that adding many links diminishes the value of each one. What I assume however is that:

• having many links in one page diminishes the control you have on them, so google may crawl some of them and give different weight on each one. That0s why I'll better put fewer links
• you're right about having more links to your pages augment the possibility of have thoes pages in a better position against other. However as I said before, beware that google may not crawl all your links all the time. You can achieve the same proiportion of importance with less links (ex. 10 links vs 2 is the same of 100 vs 20: same weight more control and less internal spam risks.
• be wise when you build your links and try to not use too many anchor rich links. Even if you're onsite you don't want to let google think you're trying to overoptimize your page or its backlink profile. Create variations of your anchors and use them all.

[sprynewmedia]

The question come from a circumstance where 100's of links are contained in a supplemental tab on a product detail page.  They link to applications of the product - each being a full product page.  On some pages, there are only 40 links, other can be upwards of 1000 as the product is used as a replacement part for many other products.

I am championing the removal of the links, if not the whole tab.   On a few pages, it would be useful to humans but clearly not on pages with 100s.

But if Google followed them all, then conceivably it would build a stronger "organic" structure to the catalogue as important products would get 1000's of links - others only a few.

Whatever value this might have, it would be negated if juice leaked faster after 100+ links.

From Matt's article above, "Google might choose not to follow or to index all those links."  He also mentions them being a spam signal so I think it still wise to keep them low even if the 100kb limit has been lifted.  Clearly there are still ramifications - a concept reinforced by this site's reports and comments.

To my question...from what both of you have said, it doesn't appear there is strong evidence a very high number of links directly causes additional penalty as far as link juice is concerned.

For the record, I'm not calculating PR or stuck on exact counts - my focus always starts with the end user.   But, I'd hate to have a structural item that causes undue damage.

[sprynewmedia]

The context is a parts page where potential hundreds of link could be associate with other parts the item fit.  I looking to firm up my argument against the concept so I want to understand better the true impact of the section.

If it was accelerating the decay of link juice, all the more reason.  If not, they may actual help certain products  appear organically stronger (i.e. a part that fits on a greater number of products will have more incoming links).

Navigation is actually quite tight (under 20 links) by modern standards.

[mememax]

As eyepaq said a 100 links limit is not the case anymore, however even if google is able to give value to them all it really makes sense to ahve so many links in your page? Are you using fat footers? Don't rely on that structure to give value to your internal pages, if you find 100 links in one page to be needed for users to navigate through your site try to restructure it a little and create different categories.

I don't know how much value is lost after 100 links but you should try to have tinier and themed list of links adding a further step in your navigation.google won't give hesmae value to those pages as users' won't either.

[eyepaq]

Hi,

You should count those at all. If you get stuck in counting and calculating PR and how much PR is passed from one page to another you will lose focus from what it dose matter. This dosen't.

About the 100 links per page -  that was a very old technical limitation from Google's side. There is no longer the case.

See more here: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-many-links-per-page/

and a fast 2 and so min video from Matt Cutts here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6g5hoBYlf0 

So the bottom line is that you should not count and focus on PR and how much PR is passed -only look at things from a normal user and ask your self: dose t his page make sense ? Dose it make sense to have over 100 links on this page ?

Not sure if this was the answer you are looking for but ... hope it helps.

Cheers.

[sprynewmedia]

I used 'PR' mainly because 'juice points' sounded stupid.

I'm more interested in what happens past the ~100 links.

Does the remaining juice get reallocated or does the page leak at a higher rate?

[mememax]

Hi Spry, as you already mentioned, not all links has the same weight, there are navigationla links like in the footer, in the menu; also google may give some different weight among them, moreover some value may be reduced, and also there are some other factors that google uses to weight each link in a page that we don't know, but we may assume they have.

So given that we can calculate an aproximate value of juice passed from a link to another I won't rely so much in PR, the time you're spending in this caluclations may be given to other tasks. In general you may assume that the best pages to obtain links are pages which are nearest to the homepage of a site and which has the least number of outgoing (both internal and external) links.

Don't rely so much on PR, I've seen so many low page rank pages ranking well and high pr pages with no rankings that I think that you need to consider other parameters which are more important when it comes to linkbuilding: age of the domain, authority, topic related, etc etc.

If your calculations are made for onsite optimization just try to have your main pages higher in your site structure and linked directly from the homepage or from m ain categories.