Pages with excessive number of links
-
Hi all, I work for a retailer and I've crawled our website with RankTracker for optimization suggestions.
The main suggestion is "Pages with excessive number of links: 4178"
The page with the largest amount of links has 634 links (627 internal, 7 external), the lowest 382 links (375 internal, 7 external).
However, when I view the source on any one of the example pages, it becomes obvious that the site's main navigation header contains 358 links, so every new page starts with 358 links before any content.
Our rivals and much larger sites like argos.co.uk appear to have just as many links in their main navigation menu.
So my questions are:
1. Will these excessive links really be causing us a problem or is it just 'good practice' to have fewer links
2. Can I use 'no follow' to stop Google etc from counting the 358 main navigation links
3. Is have 4000+ pages of your website all dumbly pointing to other pages a help or hindrance?
4. Can we 'minify' this code so it's cached on first load and therefore loads faster?Thank you.
-
There has even been a Google Webmaster Guidelines Update in February 2016 which states
"Limit the number of links on a page to a reasonable number (a few thousand at most)." (Source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en)
So I really would not bother too much, especially not in a navigation - it often makes lots of sense to have lots of links there. (For example I have several alphabetical selections available on hover from main categories. It would not make sense to remove them just to have fewer links.)
More links are of course not always better - consider what the user is likely to expect/need in navigation etc. Of course, more links mean that the relative importance of each link decreases; but google is able to identify navigation and repeating elements that appear on every page. I'd assume that they treat them different to main-content links. Because, well, they feel a lot different.
Regards
Nico
-
Pre 2013 it was bad practice to have in excess of 100 links per page, google technical guideline. Many SEO tools still use it as a warning bell. However Matt Cutts from google - I recall a few years ago - came out and categorically said it is NOT bad practice. Have as many links as you like as long as it is natural and helps the customer.
What Matt did say is if it appears like spam, them google will penalize you accordingly. Here we go just found the video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHG6BkmzDEM
So to be clear - if the links are needed and help the customer - I would not concern myself. Watch the video, nothing better than going straight to the source.
Hope that assists
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
-
If a page ranks in the wrong country and is redirected, does that problem pass to the new page?
Hi guys, I'm having a weird problem: A new multilingual site was launched about 2 months ago. It has correct hreflang tags and Geo targetting in GSC for every language version. We redirected some relevant pages (with good PA) from another website of our client's. It turned out that the pages were not ranking in the correct country markets (for example, the en-gb page ranking in the USA). The pages from our site seem to have the same problem. Do you think they inherited it due to the redirects? Is it possible that Google will sort things out over some time, given the fact that the new pages have correct hreflangs? Is there stuff we could do to help ranking in the correct country markets?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ParisChildress1 -
Are We Doing Link Building Right? Do Certain Links Actually Matter?
I've been thinking about this as I go through my daily link building activities for clients. Do we really know as much as we hope/think we do about how Google values inbound links, which links actually matter, and how much these link signals play into rankings? For example, does Google REALLY value the fact that a business is paying to sponsor a local sports team, or to join a local chamber? For local businesses, link building is rather difficult because they don't necessarily have the resources or ability to implement ongoing Content Marketing initiatives to earn links naturally. How can we be sure that the things we recommend actually make a difference? I had my family real estate business featured in almost a dozen articles as expert sources, with links from authoritative sites like Realtor.com and others. Does Google distinguish between a profile link on a site like Realtor.com vs. being featured as an expert source on home page news? Just second guessing a lot of this today. Anyone can to share thoughts and insights?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley0 -
Removing massive number of no index follow page that are not crawled
Hi, We have stackable filters on some of our pages (ie: ?filter1=a&filter2=b&etc.). Those stacked filters pages are "noindex, follow". They were created in order to facilitate the indexation of the item listed in them. After analysing the logs we know that the search engines do not crawl those stacked filter pages. Does blocking those pages (by loading their link in AJAX for example) would help our crawl rate or not? In order words does removing links that are already not crawled help the crawl rate of the rest of our pages? My assumption here is that SE see those links but discard them because those pages are too deep in our architecture and by removing them we would help SE focus on the rest of our page. We don't want to waste our efforts removing those links if there will be no impact. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Digitics0 -
How to 301 Redirect /page.php to /page, after a RewriteRule has already made /page.php accessible by /page (Getting errors)
A site has its URLs with php extensions, like this: example.com/page.php I used the following rewrite to remove the extension so that the page can now be accessed from example.com/page RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.php -f
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rcseo
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.php [L] It works great. I can access it via the example.com/page URL. However, the problem is the page can still be accessed from example.com/page.php. Because I have external links going to the page, I want to 301 redirect example.com/page.php to example.com/page. I've tried this a couple of ways but I get redirect loops or 500 internal server errors. Is there a way to have both? Remove the extension and 301 the .php to no extension? By the way, if it matters, page.php is an actual file in the root directory (not created through another rewrite or URI routing). I'm hoping I can do this, and not just throw a example.com/page canonical tag on the page. Thanks!0 -
Is it OK to Delete a Page and Move Content to a Another Page without 301 re-direct
I have a page "A" that I want to completely delete and move the written content from A" to page "B". Since I am deleting "A" (not keeping page) is it OK to upload the content from "A" to page "B" and search engines will give "B" credit for the unique content? Or, since the content has already once been indexed on "A", "B" may struggle to get full credit for this new unique content, even though page "A" is deleted?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
301 redirect or Link back from old to new pages
Hi all, We run a ticket agent, and have multiple events that occur year after year, for example a festival. The festival has a main page with each event having a different page for each year like the below: Main page
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gigantictickets
http://www.gigantic.com/leefest-tickets (main page) Event pages:
http://www.gigantic.com/leefest-2010-tickets/hawksbrook-lane-beckenham/2009-08-15-13-00-gce/11246a
http://www.gigantic.com/leefest-2010-tickets/highhams-hill-farm-warlingham/2010-08-14-13-00-gce/19044a
http://www.gigantic.com/leefest-2011-tickets/highhams-hill-farm-warlingham/2011-08-13-13-00-gce/26204a
http://www.gigantic.com/leefest-2012-tickets/highhams-hill-farm-warlingham/2012-06-29-12-00-gce/32168a
http://www.gigantic.com/leefest-2013/highhams-hill-farm/2013-07-12-12-00 my question is: Is it better to leave the old event pages active and link them back to the main page, or 301 redirect these pages once they're out of date? (leave them there until there is a new event page to replace it for this year) If the best answer is to leave the page there, should i use a canonical tag back to the main page? and what would be the best way to link back? there is a breadcrumb there now, but it doesn't seem to obvious for users to click this. Keywords we're aming for on this example are 'Leefest Tickets', which has good ranking now, the main page and 2012 page is listed. Thanks in advance for your help.0 -
Are links from pages in other languages ok?
Hey everyone, what are your thoughts on this? If a bunch of links from another language, say the site is in Canada and is in English but we have french links pointing to the site with english keywords...is that ok? Will that harm us? Opinions? Facts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jhinchcliffe0 -
How many links would you need to rank up in page rank?
White hat **** Can 20 website with page rank of 3 make your site rank higher?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | spidersite0