What does it mean that "too many links" show up in my report - but I'm not seeing them?
-
I've noticed that on the crawl report for my site, www.imageworkscreative.com, "too many links" is showing up as a chronic problem.
Reviewing the pages cited as having this issue, I don't see more than 100 links. I've read that sometimes, websites are unintentionally cloaking their links, and I am concerned that this is what might be happening on my site.
Some example pages from my crawl report are:
http://www.imageworkscreative.com/blog/, http://www.imageworkscreative.com/blog/10-steps-seo-and-sem-success/index.html, and http://www.imageworkscreative.com/blog/business-objectives-vs-user-experience/index.html.
Am I having a cloaking issue or is something else going on here? Any insight is appreciated!
-
Thanks, everyone! I appreciate the help!
-
If you read in the on page optimization tool, it is inconsistent with the crawl tool.
"Avoid Excessive Internal Links
Employing an excessive quantity of internal-pointing links may not directly harm the value of a page, but it can influence the quantity of link juice sent through those links and dilute it's ability to help get link targets crawled, indexed and ranked.
Recommendation: Scale down the number of internal links to fewer than 100 (preferrably), and, at a minimum, fewer than 300"
That said the 100 links rule is a "Warning" (Yellow) and not a Error (Red). It is still confusing.
Here is also a Matt Cutts video that refutes the 100 links
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6g5hoBYlf0
Seems like Moz needs to update its messaging around this item.
-
Yeah Mike is right on as usual here.
I just want to point out a quick way to find out how many actual links are sitting on any given page (keep in mind this won't be exact but it'll be close.)
USING CHROME:
- Right click the page and select "View Source"
- Hit CTRL+F
- Type in<a href <="" span=""></a>
<a href <="" span=""></a>
<a href <="" span="">Boom. You'll have yourself a number of results and that's how many links you have, cloaked or not cloaked, give or take.
This is easier to look at I feel like and a fun little (maybe obvious, sorry if so) tip.
Good luck!</a>
-
Hi Jess,
Using Screaming Frog, it looks like your /blog page actually has 131 links. If you add up your footer (30), plus links to your homepage (6), plus pagination (9), plus Link Building and Content article (5), and your Alex Bogusky Video article (6) - you already have 50+ and that is not including top and side navigation, as well as the rest of the articles on your page.
Matt Cutts sums things up really well in this article saying:
"...Google will index more than 100K of a page, but there’s still a good reason to recommend keeping to under a hundred links or so: the user experience. If you’re showing well over 100 links per page, you could be overwhelming your users and giving them a bad experience. A page might look good to you until you put on your “user hat” and see what it looks like to a new visitor.
But in some cases, it might make sense to have more than a hundred links. Does Google automatically consider a page spam if your page has over 100 links? No, not at all. The “100 links” recommendation is in the “Design and content” guidelines section, and it’s the Quality guidelines that contain the things that we consider webspam (stuff like hidden text, doorway pages, installing malware, etc.). Can pages with over 100 links be spammy? Sure, especially if those links are hidden or keyword-stuffed. But pages with lots of links are not automatically considered spammy by Google.
So how might Google treat pages with well over a hundred links? If you end up with hundreds of links on a page, Google might choose not to follow or to index all those links. At any rate, you’re dividing the PageRank of that page between hundreds of links, so each link is only going to pass along a minuscule amount of PageRank anyway. Users often dislike link-heavy pages too, so before you go overboard putting a ton of links on a page, ask yourself what the purpose of the page is and whether it works well for the user experience."
Hope this helps.
Mike
-
I agree with Linda. It looks like you only 60 or so hyperlinks, so you should be okay there. But, I think it was something like 120 or so @imports.
-
If you look at your source, there are a lot of @import and javascript urls; perhaps this is what is being picked up.
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
-
Wow, does a website's hosting company have that much affect on SEO?
As a small SEO agency, we also handle hosting for some of our clients. Our clients' sites are Wordpress. We set them up with a Bluehost account with a dedicated IP address, and spend a lot of time focusing on load times (implementing a CDN, optimizing images, installing W3 Total cache and using recommended settings, etc.). Last month, we had a client inform us that they are bringing their web marketing efforts in-house, so they switched to a new hosting provider and took their (existing) site to the new hosting company. They kept their old Google Analytics code installed, so I can still see how much traffic they're getting. Since switching to a new host, despite the load times taking longer, no CDN, and other errors that came up prior to us spending time "optimizing" the website, their organic traffic has increased by 26%. Same exact website, same inbound link profile. According to Webmaster Tools, their impressions and clicks have also seen dramatic increases. So now, obviously, I'm considering looking into other options for the hosting of our other clients' websites. From your experience, and especially when it comes to Wordpress websites, do you think that a hosting company can make that big of a difference in terms of SEO? I've heard of positive results from people who have used WP-Engine, and other Wordpress-dedicated hosting companies, but I just find it hard to believe that we spent so much time on load-time-specific ranking factors and come to find out, a different hosting company would have made a huge difference. Any thoughts/feedback?
Web Design | | georgetsn1 -
Sitemap created on client's Joomla site but it is not showing up on site reports as existing? (Thumbs Up To Answers)
I am working with a web developer who built our client's site in Joomla. I seem to have a lot of issues with Joomla based sites. Any how, the site is www.pitgearusa.com and when we run site reports it is showing there is no xml sitemap. However he used a popular Joomla plugin for sitemaps called Xmap. Here is their url: http://www.jooxmap.com/ Can anyone provide any advice on what the website developer needs to do in order for the xml sitemap to function and "show up" on reports? Thanks Mashed Up
Web Design | | Atlanta-SMO0 -
May I know what's the "CSS Class" here?
ul.nav a#homelink { text-indent: -9999px; background: url('http://www.elegantthemes.com/preview/MyProduct/wp-content/themes/MyProduct/images/home-icon.png') no-repeat center 6px; padding: 0px; } ul.nav a#homelink span { display: block; padding: 5px 9px 8px 5px; width: 16px; } I'm having problems in adding back the "house" icon instead of a "Home" text in my menu. I don't what "CSS class" should I use to be added in the Home menu button (Appearance>Menu). I'm currently using a "MyProducts" Wordpress theme by ElegantThemes. Thanks in advance!
Web Design | | esiow20131 -
Does Google count the domain name in its 115-character "ideal" URL length?
I've been following various threads having to do with URL length and Google's happiness therewith and have yet to find an answer to the question posed in the title. Some answers and discussions have come close, but none I've found have addressed this with any specificity. Here are four hypothetical URLs of varying lengths and configurations: EXAMPLE ONE:
Web Design | | RScime25
my-big-widgets-are-the-best-widgets-in-the-world-and-come-in-many-vibrant-and-unique-colors-and-configurations.html (115 characters) EXAMPLE TWO: sample.com/my-big-widgets-are-the-best-widgets-in-the-world-and-come-in-many-vibrant-and-unique-colors-and-configurations.html (126 characters) EXAMPLE THREE: www.sample.com/my-big-widgets-are-the-best-widgets-in-the-world-and-come-in-many-vibrant-and-unique-colors-and-configurations.html (130 characters) EXAMPLE FOUR: http://www.sample.com/my-big-widgets-are-the-best-widgets-in-the-world-and-come-in-many-vibrant-and-unique-colors-and-configurations.html (137 characters) Assuming the examples contain appropriate keywords and are linked to appropriate anchor text (etc.,) how would Google look upon each? All I've been able to garner thus far is that URLs should be as short as possible while still containing and contextualizing keywords. I have 500+ URLs to review for the company I work for and could use some guidance; yes, I know I should test, but testing is problematical to the extreme; I look to the collective/accumulated wisdom of the MOZVerse for help. Thanks.1 -
What's so great about Thesis framework?
I keep hearing about how great Thesis is for SEO. But when I look at the code, it doesn't look like anything special to me -- they followed the basics (proper title, header usage, etc.), pages load quickly, and they packaged things like title and meta control with the theme itself, but none of those things seem particularly special to me. Plenty of SEO plugins give you the same control over title & meta (and the best ones go beyond what Thesis offers) and it's easy to make sure the code is clean. What am I missing?
Web Design | | EricOliver1 -
Site Re-Design - Running old XML site map for 301's
Hi all, We are going to launch a new site design for our current e-commerce site. I have taken this opportunity to change some categories due to keyword research and all old categories will be 301ed to best fitting new category. So I have 2 questions about moving stuff over; 1. I read that leaving the old xml site map running for the first week, would help, because this would give crawlers the chance to run through the site and follow the 301s, which would help pass the juice. How true does this sound? 2. I was thinking of re-writing all category and sub category titles, meta descriptions and on page content. The positive of this is loads of fresh content - but doing this all at the same time with the new site launch might see some major dropping in search ranking. I've identified our top traffic keyword terms/pages, would it be more wise to leave these pages, and change the others, or would the total new fresh burst have a better impact? Cheers
Web Design | | ToxicFox0 -
Google Bot cannot see the content of my pages
When I go to Google Webmaster tools and I type in any URL from the site http://www.ccisolutions.com in the "Fetch as Google Bot" feature, and then I click the link that says "success," Google bot is seeing my pages like this: <code>HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Tue, 26 Apr 2011 19:11:50 GMT Server: Apache/2.2.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.6 OpenSSL/0.9.7a DAV/2 PHP/5.2.4 mod_jk/1.2.25 Set-Cookie: CCISolutions-UT-Status=66.249.72.55.1303845110495128; path=/; expires=Thu, 25-Apr-13 19:11:50 GMT; domain=.ccisolutions.com Last-Modified: Tue, 28 Oct 2008 14:36:45 GMT ETag: "314b26-5a-2d421940" Accept-Ranges: bytes Content-Length: 90 Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=99 Connection: Keep-Alive Content-Type: text/html Any clue as to why this could be happening?</code>
Web Design | | danatanseo0 -
Hiding Links Under A Tab As Good As Anything Else And More Attractive?
I'm working with a site that finds standard linking to spread authority to interior pages ugly. Here's what they don't like: footers tag clouds sidebar lists of links text heavy paragraphs with links a gallery of images with alt text/links So, I'm looking for other ways to link from their homepage to these less prominent pages inside the site. Here are my two questions: 1. Would something like this work, with the links under the "Specs" tab (p.s., this is just a random example and not my client): http://www.goincase.com/products/detail/CL57925/ 2. Any other ideas for spreading the authority via links from their homepage and other pages on the site to less powerful pages? Thanks! Best...Mike
Web Design | | 945010