too many links on a page?

Hi guys,
what is the recommended number of links in a page?
...my links page has a lot, a lot of links....

I think it is either 50 or 100, I've got a bunch of links to subsections of my site on all my pages

i heard 50 before. any validation on that?

it's not 50. I promise you that. it's not 100, either. it's not near there.

in another forum someone ran a test and said that he's had incoming links count up to the 800th link.

but just because it still works doesn't mean it carries the same weight. a page with 5 links will be giving 5 strong votes, while a page with 150 links will be giving 150 "small" votes.

the only thing you really need to watch out for is to make sure you don't go over 100KB- especially if you're linking to your own things, in a sitemap or something.

I agree with disgust....I consistently see sites that have pages with 100's of links and they still maintain decent PR. Although the votes are small they are still votes....and if they make it convenient to link to them what not....I think the PR of a link page has less to do with where the links go to but where the links to the links page come from.

On sites where the link page is connected directly to the home page, PR seems to be established easier....probably since most of the PR flowing into the site is coming to the home page. On sites where you have to click through a bunch of categories and sub categories the PR diminishes to the point where the links are useless for PR purposes.

roger abt the 100kb guys.
and linkings too.

Google suggestion is for 100 links max per page.
But not sure whether it's incoming links or outbound links.

>100 = spam on google

See

http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

Clare

That is from google's webmaster guildlines section...they are guides not rules. And deviating from those rules does NOT = spam. Google wants pages that are crawler friendly....more than 100 links out of a page or apge over 100kb is too much work for google's spider to do efficiently. So the spider will stop at some point on the page and not process any more links or content. The page will NOT be penalized or degraded in any way just for having lots of links. These pages exists all over the google index and some rank very well.

If 100 outward links is the max then a lot of pages on this forum are in violation!

I did a quick study of the first 35 pages found on the site. Seventeen pages had more than 100 links (worst =186). The other pages were mostly in the 40-60 range.

With a PR-8 it is obvious that the site is not penalized.

Now I haven't looked at the individual pages ....



Update: I had to go and think about this one for a bit

The reason Google does not want more than 100 links per page is quite simple. Mathematically the IBL is insignificant ... since the page rank is evenly distributed over all the links on a page.

In other words --- it only passes on less than 1% of it's rank.

To make matters worse the belief is that the scale is log10 so it might take 100 such links to move from PR-1 to PR-2 and 1000 to move from PR-2 to PR-3 ... and so on.

So what is a link worth to you if there are 100's on a page?

I think it's best to keep 50 *Quality* outgoing links from 1 page and if these outgoing links are related to the topic then it's more helpful. Also if strategically we include links of inner pages from High PR pages of website, then it will be helpful to increase PR of inner pages and overall website.

When you say outgoing links do you mean like if I say Microsoft on my page to link to it because it is a quality outgoing link? Is this going to help my page rank because I link to a large site?

Also, when I link to internal pages should I use the complete URL (i.e. http://www.mysite.com/pagename.html) or should I just use the page name?

Does this count as an outgoing link?

Technically outgoing links on a page does not increase your PR for that page.

Links are votes for another page and increase the PR for the page you are pointing towards.

It does not matter what form you use to point to internal pages, either method works just fine. Google can handle relative or absolute addresses.

EXCEPT when pointing to your home page.

Google has no reliable way to determine what page your domain name defaults to. In other words default.* and http://www.domain.com are two different pages. So it is important to be consistant here!

on our directory script we make it ten links listing. So sticking to this number helps . Although i heard it was around 50 but cannot say for sure

eCommando has the correct answer above.



No need to speculate on this ....