This week, Matt Cutts talked about the permissible number of links on a webpage. SEO professionals, content marketing professionals and webmasters have been wary of adding too many links on a page for the obvious reason that it will spring search engine spiders into a spam alert. The understanding floating around is that any more than 100 links per page can attract a penalty by Google. Cutts, in his video, sought to dispel this myth. Actually, Google removed the 100-link-per-page guideline back in 2008. It now says that a webpage should have a reasonable number of links. It is not clear what constitutes ‘reasonable’, but here are some pearls of wisdom SEO experts have to offer.
A site like Techmeme may have thousands of links on its Home Page but not be penalized by Google. The search engine is wary of sites that look spammy and an excess number of links only seek to confirm the hunch. Experts recommend adding more than 100 links on your webpage if it has many quality links pointing to it. But the main issue with adding a large number of links to a page has to do with user experience. Users will find it that much more difficult to navigate links, which can be avoided by creating another webpage. An alternative is to organize the page cleanly and in a way that enables visitors to easily find what they are looking for.
Cutts also spoke about the relation between PageRank and number of links on a webpage. The PageRank is divided by the number of links on a page. So, if page X links to pages Y, Z and A, then the rank is broken down into three. So, basically, the 100+ links on the webpage are divided by hundreds more, and so on. The lesson is to assess the necessity of adding several links and see if creating another page is a better SEO strategy.
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