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
-
Items 30 - 50", however this is not accurate. Articles/Pages/Products counts are not close to this, products are 100+, so are the articles. We would want to either hide this or correct this.
We are running into this issue where we see items 30 -50 appear underneath the article title for google SERP descriptions . See screenshot or you can preview how its appearing in the listing for the site here: https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&ei=5I5fX939L6qxytMPh_el4AQ&q=site%3Adarbyscott.com&oq=site%3Adarbyscott.com&gs_lcp=CgZwc3ktYWIQAzoICAAQsQMQgwE6BQgAELEDOgIIADoECAAQCjoHCAAQsQMQClDYAljGJmC9J2gGcAB4AIABgwOIAYwWkgEIMjAuMy4wLjKYAQCgAQGqAQdnd3Mtd2l6sAEA&sclient=psy-ab&ved=0ahUKEwjd_4nR_ejrAhWqmHIEHYd7CUwQ4dUDCAk&uact=5 Items 30 - 50", however this is not accurate and we are not sure what google algorithm is counting. . Articles/Pages/Products counts are not close to this, products are 100+, so are the articles. Anyone have any thoughts on what google is pulling for the count and how to correct this? We would want to either hide this or correct this. view?usp=sharing
Web Design | | Raymond-Support0 -
JS and HTML links: Any risk involved being employing two similar links on every page?
Hi all, We used a have a banner with link from all pages our subdomain. The link is JS link and it's linking to our website homepage from our sub domain. Recently we have added similar HTML link from all pages of sub domain presuming that Google might not be considering JS links. So, now we have 2 links (JS and HTML) from every page of sub domain pointing to the website. If Google considers 2 links, will there be any risk for employing same link twice from every page? Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Avg Page Load Time Increase After Responsive Web Design
The Avg. Page Load Time has been steadily increasing after our website went responsive. What could have cause this?
Web Design | | JMSCC1 -
Page missing meta description some times a good thing?
Just courious to why http://moz.com/learn/seo does not appear to have the meta tag: name="description" content=""> Is this purposely done this way for some reason? Or has it become less important? Just curious.
Web Design | | DanielMulderNL0 -
Site structure- category pages
Hi, I'm relatively new to SEO but have tried to apply all best practices to my site. However, I've hit a stumbling block when it comes to whether or not to index my category pages. http://istudyenglishonline.com/category/expressions-idioms/ General info: the site has been created with Wordpress and has a directory of English idioms. Each idiom is associated with one or more categories that it falls under (emotions, sports, food etc). Each category has its own page where the list of idioms will be. As each idiom often has more than one associated category, the same idiom will appear in different category pages, thus creating duplicate content. However, I have given each category page its own unique description. The issue is, when there are numerous idioms, the category page will have more than 1 page. I don't have the ability to create a unique description for each subsequent page of the main category. I know that the very model for some vertical search engines (such as indeed.com) is to create such landing pages and that the more "categories" that they have assigned to their job ads, in this case, the more pages created and the more pages indexed in Google. This seems to work very well for them. My question is, am I doing things right? Should I be doing anything to the subsequent category pages to avoid duplicate content? My plan was to have so many idioms associated with so many categories that I have a fair number of landing pages indexed in google, thus attacking the long tail keywords. However, I'm not sure if I am going the right way. Any advice would be much appreciated!
Web Design | | villarroel0 -
Are there any studies, statistics or measurable impact of using mixed fonts on landing pages?
Are there any studies, statistics or measurable impact of using mixed fonts on landing pages? One of our landing pages is using five variations of the Arial font where size, strength (bold, italics) and color all vary. One camp internally believes that this okay, whereas another camp wants to standardize the presentation where there's less variance (such as a heading as one and the body copy as another). Have you been through a similar trial or test in the past? I've seen some instances of a Marketing Sherpa study on the topic, but no real numbers to support one thing or another. I've attached an example image of our current LP. I have a lot of strong opinions on a number of items - but we're looking to have an immediate internal discussion on the font issue first. Thanks! GIzA8.jpg
Web Design | | eMagineSEO0 -
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 -
Combining web pages and it's affects on SEO?
We are looking into amending a website we are working on to try and combine 2 or 3 current pages onto one page. This site is similar to an estate agents site and currently has images, map, floor plan sub pages etc. Can anyone tell me, if we were to combine these pages and include the above details on one page, how that would affect the current search engine rankings?
Web Design | | SoundinTheory0