Too Many Links on One Page - What to Do?!
-
Hello Geniuses, Prodigies, and Experts of the Field,
My website pages for www.1099pro.com have too many links on one page, something like 150-175, and I understand that each page should ideally be under 100. Most of these links, approx 105, come from dropdown navigation options in the header toolbar or the footer links.
It is my take that these links make our site easier to navigate but I'm sure that they are hurting my pagerank / SERPs. Is there a best way to handle a situation like this? I'd really prefer not to alter the header/footer layout of the entire site by removing 50-75 navigational links. The only other idea I have is below but I have no idea if it would work.
- For any link that I do not care to pass pagerank, institute a "nofollow" parameter. This would be my favorite option if it is viable.
-
That's good to hear and thanks for the input!
The MOZ page grader told me that over 100 links was too many and so did a commenter from a separate post. All clear now though.
-
The reasoning behind limiting the number of links is because the amount of authority that is passed by a page is divided by the total number of links on that page - regardless of nofollow or not. So, the fewer links the more authority you are passing to each of those internal pages. Answering your subsidiary question, there would be no SEO benefit from nofollowing these links.
That being said, usability trumps this in my book always. Go into your Google Analytics, and see which of these links people are actually clicking. If they are going into your drop down links, then leave them. If they are only clicking on the head link, then consider chopping them.
-
As long as they are all listed in the sitemap, dont worry about it. William is correct in that Google lifted the 100 links per page limit. The question is, do the links serve a purpose, or are they there to increase the page count? Perhaps you are not seeing the engagement or seo results you want due to the organization of the site structure?
BTW, who or what told you there was a need to reduce the link count? Unless you got manually penalized, why is there a need to do this?
-
Google updated their guidelines a while ago, and no longer suggests the 100 or less links per page. Now the guideline simply states, "Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number," which is subjective. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en
With a site like yours, full of different kinds of forms and such, it's logical to consider having 100+ links per page. There are other options for you as well, if you believe these links are hurting, but according to Google they likely are not.
If you wanted to try something different, you could think about building out detailed category pages for each sections of things you offer on the site, and make those the pages that rank for your terms. This way, the number of links on your main page is dramatically reduced, and the user experience might improve, since things aren't quite as condensed.
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
-
With Google's new Speed Update, what does that mean for AMP pages?
Hey everyone! I wanted to get the other Mozzers opinions on this. With Google announcing a new Speed Update that will affect mobile rankings, I wanted to ask: How will AMP pages play into this? Let me know what you think!
Web Design | | TaylorRHawkins
Thanks!2 -
CAPTCHA Alternatives to Improve Page Load Speed
Recently I had to install reCAPTCHA on my site. The site contains domain name generators and they were being misused, in the words of my host: _Addition of a Captcha will go one of two ways - hit the bruting on the head as intended - OR it will increase the load and the impact by rendering the Captcha's. _ Have noticed that reCAPTCHA adds a fair amount of code 32% of page size and 5 requests. I want to replace reCAPTCHA with an alternative, has anyone got any ideas? Cheers. Justin
Web Design | | GrouchyKids0 -
Is it important to keep your website home index page simple to rank better?
My website http://www.endeavourcottage.co.uk/ markets holiday cottages and it's grown from my own singular cottage into a small letting agency and I used to rank at best number 3 for the short tailed keywords like Whitby holiday cottages with its drop-down to position 10 on Google.co.uk. So this week I was looking for a UK business to help me improve my rankings and the first thing they said was my home page is detrimental with the listing too many conflicting info with it advertising all 12 properties on it. They suggested a door entry page into the site keeping it simple but when I run it through the analysing tool here on Moz for "Whitby holiday cottages" as an example it came out looking okay. I do the usual things of title tags and meta descriptions for my keywords etc any suggestions or advice would be very welcome thank you Alan
Web Design | | WhitbyHolidayCottages0 -
Our on page blog is off page! What?
Hi Moz Community, I have a customer who has a blog that is FULL of great unique content however the blog resides at a URL that differs from the main site. Eg. blog.mywebsite.com Instead of www.mywebsite.com/blog . With the latest Google updates I fear that this may be hurting our web ranking. In addition the web blog is a carbon copy of the main URL. My Question: I am going to schedule a meeting with the web designers, How vociferously should I argue for having them move the blog onsite and write 301 redirects for the current blog site?
Web Design | | CKerr0 -
Infinite Page Scrolling for e-commerce Product Catetegories
Hi There, I would like to know what's the pros and cons of Infinite Page Scrolling for e-commerce Product Categories that have over 700 products. Sample here Secondly how will this effect our on page SEO as far as google concerned? Many Thanks
Web Design | | Jvalops0 -
Sudden dramatic drops in SERPs along with no snippet and no cached page?
We are a very stable, time tested domain (over 15 yrs old) with thousands of stable, time tested inbound links. We are a large catalog/e commerce business and our web team has over a decade's experience with coding, seo etc. We do not engage in link exchanges, buying links etc and adhere strictly to best white hat seo practices. Our SERPs have generally been very stable for years and years. We continually update content, leverage user generated content etc, and stay abreast of important algorithm and policy changes on Google's end. On Wednesday Jan 18th, we noticed dramatic, disturbing changes to our SERPs. Our formerly very stable positions for thousands of core keywords dropped. In addition, there is no snippet in the SERPs and no cached page for these results. Webmaster tools shows our sitemap most recently successfully downloaded by Google on Jan 14th. Over the weekend and monday the 16th, our cloud hosted site experienced some downtime here and there. I suspect that the sudden issues we are seeing are being caused by one of three possibilities: 1. Google came to crawl when the site was unavailable.
Web Design | | jamestown
However, there are no messages in the account or crawl issues otherwise noted to indicate this. 2. There is a malicious link spam or other attack on our site. 3. The last week of December 2011, we went live with Schema.org rich tagging on product level pages. The testing tool validates all but the breadcrumb, which it says is not supported by Schema. Could Google be hating our Schema.org microtagging and penalizing us? I sort of doubt bc category/subcategory pages that have no such tags are among those suffering. Whats odd is that ever since we went live with Schema.org, Google has started preferring very thin content pages like video pages and articles over our product pages. This never happened in the past. the site is: www.jamestowndistributors.com Any help or ideas are greatly, greatly appreciated. Thank You DMG0 -
Too Many Links Since Mega Menu Implementation
We have an issue with our recently introduced ‘mega-menu’, which has increased our link count on all pages (as it is a global menu across the entire website). Is it acceptable to load our mega-menu drop-down content onto the page via AJAX in order to reduce the number of on-page links, leaving only the department headings as on-page links (in order to keep the user experience the same/similar)? Or is dynamic loading of link content frowned upon by Google? We would still have the ‘AJAX'd’ links available as on-page/crawlable links in the left menu of the department landing pages, by navigating via the department headings. Any help/advice that could be offered is welcomed. Thanks
Web Design | | DVCrawler0 -
Dynamic pages and code within content
Hi all, I'm considering creating a dynamic table on my site that highlights rows / columns and cells depending on buttons that users can click. Each cell in the table links to a separate page that is created dynamically pulling information from a database. Now I'm aware of the google guidelines: "If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few." So we wondered whether we could put the dynamic pages in our sitemap so that google could index them - the pages can be seen with javascript off which is how the pages are manipulated to make them dynamic. Could anyone give us a overview of the dangers here? I also wondered if you still need to separate content from code on a page? My developer still seems very keen to use inline CSS and javascript! Thanks a bundle.
Web Design | | tgraham0