A lot of clients ask me, “How many links is too many?” That answer is easy and complicated in the same breath.
As I go through client websites, I look at a number of different factors to determine where they need SEO help.
One area that I run into quite often is a page or several pages of links. And sometimes these link pages can have a LOT of links on them.
Some are links to internal pages, other helpful resources, some are links to other businesses that they recommend, and others are links that are exchanged with people from other websites.
But how many links is too many on a webpage?
The standard rule of thumb (easy answer) is no more that 100 links on a page. Some websites actually use a guideline of 1 link for every 250 words on a page.
To get into the harder answer you need to take a look at number of factors.
If you have a good page rank, your passing that link juice along to every other web page that you link to (if it’s a follow link). If it’s an internal page, don’t worry about this. However, if you have a high page rank (which does not happen easily), do you really want to be passing along that page rank to other websites? Probably not.
Also, too many links on one page tend to look a lot like spam. Especially if you have multiple keywords in one paragraph that are all linked to a specific page in your blog, or a particular affiliate offer.
Now that 100 links is not just the links in a blog post or the content itself. Those 100 links that I’m speaking about are links on your entire page. The links in your header, navigation, sidebar, the content itself, and even footer links. All of these count as individual links and all add up to the magical 100 number.
The search engines can’t determine that a link is your navigation bar is different that a link in your content or your footer. The way that they see it, a link is a link. It doesn’t matter where it is at on the page.
Now with all of that said you also need to understand that you’re probably not going to get penalized if you have more than 100 links on a page. However, the search engines tend to only follow 100 links on a page and then they will stop. So even if you have 200 links, it will be pointless as the search engines will not follow them.
Also, if you’re going to have those links…make sure that they are relevant to the content on your page. The more relevant that they are, the more weight that they provide for your content.
Let us know in the comments below if you have any thing else relevant to How Many Links is Too Many.