What's the max number of links you should ever have on a page?
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Our homepage has a few hundred links and our index pages(pages that link to our spintext pages) have about 900 links on them with no content. Our SEO guy said we have to keep the links under 1000 but I wanted to see what you guys think.
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I think in Danny Dover's book he suggests no more than 150.
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"Link Juice" passes from one page to another based on the number of links on that page. Here's what the SEOmoz basic guide to SEO says about it;
Number of Links on a Page
According to the original PageRank formula, the value that a link passes is diluted by the presence of other links on a page. Thus, getting linked-to by a page with few links is better than being linked-to by the same page with many links on it (all other things being equal). The degree to which this is relevant is unknowable (and in our testing, it appears to be important, but not overwhelmingly so), but it's certainly something to be aware of as you conduct link acquisition.
So the more links you have on a page, the less value each link passes.
The SEOmoz optimization report says to avoid "Excessive" internal and external links, and I think that number is somewhere between 100 and 150.
I don't think that you should get to a "maximum" number of links. Instead you should aggressively reduce the number of links to find the minimum. See also: Link Sculpting
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900 links and no content, and something called "spintext". This sets off a few warning bells to me that the site doesn't seem to be for users as much as the search engines. Are you able to drop a link to the site? If so, we could give a little more opinion. It does seem to be a bit high for links.
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I don't think there is any "good" rule of thumb out there, as it really depends on your website and the amount of authority you have, but I would say that your SEO guy is certainly right in that you should try to cut back on the amount of links you have. I don't know what your website is, but I would generally say that anywhere close to 1000 is probably too much. Mathematically speaking, the more links you have on any given page, the more the "link juice" is going to be divided up. For this reason, it makes sense to focus internal links on your most important pages, particularly if they are coming from one of your strongest pages, like your home page.
SEOmoz's Pro tool uses 100 links as their standard. Any pages with more than 100 links get flagged. In Danny Dover's book, Search Engine Optimization Secrets, I believe he cites his number as 150.
Dr. Pete wrote a tremendous post on this topic earlier this year which is certainly worth a read.
The rule of thumb I would use: Are these links good for the user? Is this the optimal way to offer easy navigation to my visitors? Can this be done easier, cleaner, or more efficiently?
At the end of the day, if your page is authoritative enough, something like too many links isn't going to pose a problem. But if they're affecting user experience, or if they're weakening your SEO efforts, than they can certainly hold you back.
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