Internal page links and possible penalties
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If one looks at a page on our client's website, (http://truthbook.com/urantia-book/paper-98-the-melchizedek-teachings-in-the-occident for example), there are a huge amount of links in the body of the page. All internal links are normal links. All external links arerel="nofollow" class="externallink"
We have two questions: 1. Could we be being penalized by google for having too many links on these pages? Will this show i our webmaster reports?
2. If we are being penalized, can we keep the links (and have no penalty) if we made the internal links rel="nofollow" class="externallink" as well? We need these internal links to help people use these pages as an educational tool. This is why these pages also have audio and imagery.
Thank you
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This is a book they're presenting on their site, of course it's not unique content. I'm sure they're aware of that.
OP, to your questions:
1. Generally you won't be penalized for having too many links on a page, but Google will only crawl so many of them. The higher authority your site is, you can have tons of links on a page and get more of them crawled.
2. What makes you think you're being penalized? Significant drop in traffic?
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The big concern with a page like this, is that this is not unique content. I copied and pasted a line from the text into google with quotes: "Having grown out of the earlier religious forms of worship of the family gods" and found many pages with the exact same content, the book posted.
Worrying about 'optimizing' duplicate content is a no win game. You need to create new content. If you have duplicate content like this, you need to add a significant amount of additional value to it to make it unique. You could NoIndex these pages as well, as there are certainly times it makes sense to have duplicate content on your site, for the users benefit.
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1. Could we be being penalized by google for having too many links on these pages? Will this show i our webmaster reports?
Penalized, no, not likely. If so Wikipedia would be in trouble. You do however pass less link power for each link.
2. If we are being penalized, can we keep the links (and have no penalty) if we made the internal links rel="nofollow" class="externallink" as well? We need these internal links to help people use these pages as an educational tool. This is why these pages also have audio and imagery.
It is perfectly natural and even beneficial to link to relevant topics inside you page, both internally and externally. As mentioned above the thing to pay most attention to is, that you do not dilute very important pages with a multitude of in-significant links.
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