You presently have 348 links on your home page. It is far too many.

You are welcome to keep those links, but it will likely be a poor user experience and your search results will be negatively impacted as well.

If I operated your current site I would redesign it in such a manner so there were under 100 links on your home page. If there are 120 or 140, that can work fine. 348 is far too many, especially for a site with DA of 31.

Correct.

You will be choosing to flow link juice to your more important pages.

You can use Google Analytics or other tools to determine which links are not used. In most cases, footer links are seldom used. If you were to perform a link analysis of your home page you will likely find only a small percentage of those links are actually used. While you are familiar with your site imagine being a first time visitor to the site and trying to find the right link out of a list of 700+.

But our link count has been this high for a long time.

Are you happy with your site's current SEO performance? If so, there is no need to change. If you wish to improve your site's SEO, I would suggest your link structure is a major issue.

So you are telling me, that if i decrease the link count my page will have a higher authority?

No. Your authority remains the same whether you have 1 link or 1000. The difference is how that authority is distributed throughout your site.

The concept of optimization is about prioritizing. You want the most link juice to go to the most important pages such as your money page, official interviews, and the most popular articles.

The trimming of links is most important on the homepage or should this be done on each and every page?

It should be done of every page. It is more important on the home page, but it affects every page.

Should I consider setting "nofollow" for some of the links on other pages than the homepage?

Definitely not. When you nofollow a link, you do not save any link juice. You stop the link juice of flowing to the link but it does not flow to other links on your page.

The idea of optimizing your links is to step back and take a fresh look at your links and question whether they are all truly necessary and helpful. Your home page presently offers over 700 links. You really need to cut your link count to less then 100.

The primary recommendation is to provide links to the main category pages, but not all the subcategories. For example you have a Bookmaker link on your home page, then list out 25 different bookmakers. Instead simply link to the Bookmaker page and offer the bookmaker links there. Apply this process to all your categories.

The New York Times is about the most packed home page of links a site can reasonably offer, then their link count is half of yours. They can support having that many links because their DA is 100, the maximum possible for a web site, whereas your DA is 31. You really need to find a way to get under 100 links. If you do not make a change, your rankings and site indexation will suffer.

Hi Loren.

I took a look at the pages you shared. There is definitely a problem with the title. The Title field is supposed to have a maximum of 70 characters. Anything beyond that is cut off. I've seen some titles go a bit past that but your first page has a title with over 500 characters, and the second page you list has over 600 characters.

Another problem is the title's purpose is to let users and search engines understand the topic of the page. All of your titles begin with "Electronic Parts". Duplicating the same term at the beginning of all your titles is very bad for SEO.

Each page requires a unique, relevant, readable title under 70 characters.

Additionally, the page content is really poor. These are not indexable pages. Your pages all have the identical header, footer and sidebar which is understandable. Then you offer the exact same form at the top. After there is just a very long list of part numbers. There is no readable text, no sentences, no paragraphs, nothing to index except hundreds of part numbers.

Your site requires major SEO attention if you wish to be listed in search engines.

Hi Kevin,

I responded to this question here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/trailing-slashes-in-url-use-canonical-url-or-301-redirect#post-53208

In short, you have taken all the proper action. You have done everything possible to ensure users properly link to your site by using a consistent URL format. You have also properly redirected those users who do not use the proper format, which is much better then many sites which simply generate a 404 error.

If you set up your site properly from day 1, the result should be over 90% of the links to your site are valid, and a small percentage require a single redirect. It's the best result you can hope for. You cannot achieve 100% efficiency as links from other sites are outside your control.

You are absolutely correct Kevin. By deciding to use a specific URL format on your site and consistently using the same format in all internal links you have done everything in your control. The overwhelming majority of the external links to your site will be correct.

Additionally, the links which use the wrong format will then be 301'd to their correct format rather then offering a 404 error. Only a very small percentage of links should require redirection and those that do will get it.