How many links per page?

I’m about to publish a blog post with a ton of links in it — almost two hundred of them. So before I did that, it seemed like a good time to talk about Google’s recommendation to “Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).” Why do we provide that recommendation, and what if you decide to ignore that guidance?

The original reason we provided that recommendation is that Google used to index only about 100 kilobytes of a page. When we thought about how many links a page might reasonably have and still be under 100K, it seemed about right to recommend 100 links or so. If a page started to have more than that many links, there was a chance that the page would be so long that Google would truncate the page and wouldn’t index the entire page.

These days, Google will index more than 100K of a page, but there’s still a good reason to recommend keeping to under a hundred links or so: the user experience. If you’re showing well over 100 links per page, you could be overwhelming your users and giving them a bad experience. A page might look good to you until you put on your “user hat” and see what it looks like to a new visitor.

But in some cases, it might make sense to have more than a hundred links. Does Google automatically consider a page spam if your page has over 100 links? No, not at all. The “100 links” recommendation is in the “Design and content” guidelines section, and it’s the Quality guidelines that contain the things that we consider webspam (stuff like hidden text, doorway pages, installing malware, etc.). Can pages with over 100 links be spammy? Sure, especially if those links are hidden or keyword-stuffed. But pages with lots of links are not automatically considered spammy by Google.

So how might Google treat pages with well over a hundred links? If you end up with hundreds of links on a page, Google might choose not to follow or to index all those links. At any rate, you’re dividing the PageRank of that page between hundreds of links, so each link is only going to pass along a minuscule amount of PageRank anyway. Users often dislike link-heavy pages too, so before you go overboard putting a ton of links on a page, ask yourself what the purpose of the page is and whether it works well for the user experience.

113 Responses to How many links per page? (Leave a comment)

  1. There is a common development issue when your site is a directory or classifieds site, with tree-like structure, and a lot of leaves in the endings. Itยดs good to know that G won’t consider pages over 100 links spammy, but when it is necessary to list and paginate thousands of items. there is no way to pass along much PageRank anyway.

  2. Glad you clarified this Matt.

    Some sites like popurls or alltop pages have >100 links on one page and they still deliver a good user experience.

  3. Here’s another interesting chart by Nick Bilton of NYT that visualizes the number of links on the homepages of popular websites.

    http://www.nickbilton.com/98/

  4. Nice chart — thanks for pointing that out Amit.

  5. Hi Matt,
    Iโ€™m leaving comment first time here; Iโ€™ve some doubt i.e. the reason I participate in this conversation,
    If the page has near about 75 internal links + 75 external links (related to the theme) =150 links (overall links) and the page size is under 100kb. So the crawler will truncate the remaining 50 links or will index all of them.

    Please lighten up in this issue.

    Thanks

  6. I wonder links between pages are counted by Google that way? Do duplicated links at a page are counted? (People often use images as a link to an article beside the text link…). Do you have any ideal on these links?

  7. I was just going to say, I think this blog with it’s sidebar, name hyperlinks, post links, comment links, etc is well over 100 links already.

  8. mmm… well over 100 links kind of like a blog post. Okay, so most blogs automatically nofollow links. But I find often that many of the links on a post can lead to the discovery of a good site.

  9. Hey Matt, do these rules apply to both internal and external, or only external links in preference? I am planning to make a hidden box with sliding out list of links right under the header on the website (this is hardly possible to put this list in the end of page) – this will about 100 links already which I am interested in passing PR less than links to pages which are real content – how should this be handled.

    I know this question is quiet personal, but this could be a great example for other directory-type websites and not only.

    Thanks!

  10. Dave (original)

    Matt, haven’t counted, but I bet you blog home page has more than 100 links ๐Ÿ™‚

  11. Being a huge google and mattcutts fan boy myself, it is the articles like this that keep the matt bashing down. ๐Ÿ™‚

    I love google and can never thank it enough for all the great people it has brought me and my sites.

    I really think that the more transparent the entire algorithm is, the better the experience for everyone on all sides. It just makes writing the algorithm tougher if everyone knows exactly how it works, and you are able to keep it so it still can’t be gamed ๐Ÿ™‚

    Thanks for the info, as I have held back on outbound links before because it seemed like just to many for a page.

  12. Hi Matt,

    This doubt in my mind for a long time. Thanks for clarifying this.

  13. Matt

    Thanks for the post and providing the transparency on this subject. Could you follow it up with two helpful pointers please?

    1. As per Shimon above, does the content of your post hold true if those links are external? The help pages do not distinguish this in their guidelines

    2. I have 30,000+ pages per language – I try and produce a good user experience by having various categories and a reasonable search facility – but what is the best way of presenting these so that Google indexes them?

    Supplemental – I have about 97,000 pages out of 130,000 “Sitemapped” pages in the index according to Webmaster tools. Google scans about 25,000 pages of my site per day and the best I have seen is about 102,000 pages…can you see a frustration here…?

    Thanks

    Grahame

  14. Hi Matt,

    I’m glad you decided to write this article. I agree that on a regular web site having more then 100 links on a page can make that page look a little odd. But what about blogs ? Many times a blog can easily exceed the 100 barrier with tags, archives, categories, frequent used tags, article links, blogrolls, adds. The 100 limit made me to drop the widget that showed my frequent used tags. I just hope that Google takes into account this matter with blogs.

    Thanks,
    @TomaBonciu

  15. Matt, Question for you – your post brings up “hidden text”. We have a client that is using HTML/CSS for their navigation. The text in the navigation bar – which is essentially an unordered list, is white. The background of the entire site is white. Images are called in by the CSS to be the backgrounds for the navigation – which, of course, allows you to see the white navigation text.

    But IF someone had the images setting in their browser set to “off” (and I’m not sure why anyone would ever do this), the navigation text would appear to be white on white. Is this a “no no” or does Google recognize that the text is white, but sitting on a colored background image?

    Thanks in advance.

    Tom

  16. Any Dutchies will know Startpagina.nl and the endless amount of clones… One big link-o-rama. I’ve always failed to see the value for the user. A lot of pages are simply too big. Even if they use category listings. But the big G seems to like their link selling hineys. ๐Ÿ˜‰

  17. Really Really Good Post!

    It’s very interesting see you talking about PR sculpting. ๐Ÿ™‚

    and about that phrase

    “But pages with lots of links are not automatically considered spammy by Google.”

    It’s good to know, because so many people use some pages like a “secondary” sitemap for four level pages, for example.

  18. Hi,

    i have a question. Let’s say i got a website about apples and i put on the startpage around 30 Links to other website about apples – just because i link them or they got informations I’m not have – an I link to them with the linktext “Apples Info”, “Apples help”, “Appletrees”…a whole lot of “Apple” Links. Ist there a danger, that google may take this Links as Keyword-Spam for the Keyword “Apple”?

    I would be great if you could help me..

    Greets
    Oliver

  19. What about if my site has 500 links on the homepage, however I’m using CSS to present these links and stories within tabs – so only 50 are viewable to a user at any one point.

    I would assume Google would struggle to algorithmically detect exactly what I am, or am not showing the end user?

    I only ask because, this would be a point at which I would have to make a specific change to my site for search engines, not users.

  20. Hey Matt nice post. I can see everyone tighten up as a page rank update is coming maybe St Patty’s Day would be nice. Could you do a post about the real deal on making your site do follow and in fact making every link followed.
    I know it’s a played out topic and one you may not want to answer but looking at many samples I know what time it is ๐Ÿ™‚
    Thanks
    Stumbled

  21. I flat out love you when you post suff like this. Thats a common myth I have thrown at me, and having somewhere “official” to point to when answering will be very helpful. Up to now, I’ve had to essentially say “trust me”

    >> Google used to index only about 100 kilobytes of a page

    I’ve seen examples up to 5Mb – I’m sure you’d go higher for certain sites

    >> Google would truncate the page and wouldnโ€™t index the entire page.

    Yeah, that was occasionally useful, LOL

    But “w00t” for hub-like score

  22. Great post, I have been wondering about this for a long time. It’s great to know that it’s still okay to have more than 100 links per web page.

    I know of a few instances where it’s more likely to have more than 100 links, which would generally be a sitemap page (i.e., sitemap.html). I believe that if you categorize those links well and indent them when necessary then that page can be useful and provide a good user experience.

  23. So if I’m not worried about passing PageRank onto other pages, I can have more than 100 links? I run a directory listing theater productions, broken out by initial letter in the show’s name. If there are more than 100 shows starting with the letter “T” that would be ok, right? I tried splitting the longer letters into smaller lists, but that was very un-user friendly. http://www.showbizradio.net/shows/

  24. @Amit Agarwal: Clearly Aljazeera and Dooce have the best user experience out of hundreds of media companies ๐Ÿ™‚

  25. I can’t really think of what type of the website will have such a lot of links (more than 100). Directory listing? Anyway I will just keep this in mind for not having more than 100 links for a page. Matt, when you say Google might choose not to follow or to index all those links? Which mean the page rank will not pass on to those links? Does it affect the current page ranking?

  26. This is interesting because someone could clearly have over a hundred links but it is clear when visiting the website that it is for user experience and not to increase rankings. How does the search engine distinguish with user experience?

  27. It’s nice to know that the quantity of links on a page isn’t a cause for concern. I think in the majority of cases where more than 100 links appear on a page, the user typically will only see a small fraction of that due to context sensitive menus or Ajaxy type elements.

  28. Matt – what about nofollow links? if the total number is over 100 total links including nofollow but under 100 dofollow links, does your comment “Google might choose not to follow or to index all those links” still apply?

    This is relevant for both user-generated content (e.g. blog comments) and for doing PageRank sculpting.

    Thanks!

  29. Grahame Davies, it still holds true for external links — but don’t forget to ask whether it’s a good experience for users. In general, the more links you have pointing to your site, the deeper into your site we’ll crawl.

    Mark, we can handle a lot of common web design idioms. I would ask an external/unrelated person to make sure that they don’t think it looks spammy though.

    Michael Clark, I wouldn’t worry about that case.

  30. Dave (original)

    So making sites for SE’s, not humans, seems to becoming more important with each passing day according to your Blog, Matt.

  31. Thanks for explaining this Matt. It does makes sense from a historical perspective in that the size of the page determined the reason. And as always your emphasis on user experience explains why it remains a good practice to continue.

  32. There are more than 100 links on this page… There are over 70 links on your left hand nav bar alone.

    The word “link” is a very broad term. Does that refer to links to external sites? Links to the same domain?

    The amount of links on a page has no weight on the quality of the said page.

  33. From my experience it makes a huge difference how you also categorize the links. Not just for the user, but how Google values it. If you slap 100 links on there with a header saying ยจVisit the following pagesยจ, you are less likely going to gain favor than having categorical text above blocks of links and the links within each blocks sharing a certain topic being used in the headers as well.

  34. I think even if 100k is the limit for a page size and there are 100 links in it, it would mean that there are no texts in addition to the links! So, I would say that before this post, a lot less than 100 could be some ideal number.

    I’ve always used a link together with some textual explanation about that page I’ve linked to. This will be more useful for human visitors as well. Eventually, I would choose to limit my links to a number like 20-30. The linked pages will benefit to have links in a page with more link juice distributed among them. The page readers will benefit more by reading a sentence or two about each link before they click on them.

  35. Hi, In the nytimes.com for example, there are many links, and this are necesary.

    How should Google it? It is a very important site

  36. @Amit Agarwal

    Great chart! thanks!

  37. matt cutts is my co pilot, who really needs a 100 links and still have a good site.

  38. Very interesting news, Thanks Matt to share this with us. Now we can refine easily our out going links strategy. Also the chart is very useful and systematic. Thanks to amit to point out this.

  39. Dear Matt,
    Greetings!
    I appreciate your hard-work for penning down the details about google view of back link. What i found fishy was the no-follow links. What about them? Are they also counted in 100 back links. Please clear my doubts
    http://www.netedgecomputing.com

  40. So making sites for SEโ€™s, not humans, seems to becoming more important with each passing day according to your Blog, Matt.

    Google’s webmaster guidelines now say to “Make pages _primarily_ for users, not for search engines” – see:
    http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/improved-seo-documentation-galore/

  41. This leads to a question I have. What do you think about inlinks?
    https://www.inlinks.com/faq/aboutus/

    In reality; the inlinks service to stick in links way after a blog post was created which also has many other links in it already. I see that searchengineland.com and Danny Sullivan now takes advertising money from inlinks. Does Adwords do the same? Does Matt Cutts indorse this kind of link buying? As you can see, they advertise the fact the links are static and html and also help with search engines like Google. In fact; they state a search engine rep or anyone working for a search engine cannot register for the service. What is Google going to do about this kind of crap anyway? Anything? Do you endorse this like Danny Sullivan does?

    Just curious.

  42. thanks for finally clearing up the 100k issue, i spent loads of time aguing with people about this and youve finally confirmed my stance.

    would a site-wide footer link to a sitemap page containing alinks to 1000’s of products on an ecommerce site help to get these pages indexed more quickly (webmaster tools submitted sitemaps are taking an age)

    tia. mark

  43. When all is said and done, I guess it all boils down to whether the links on a page are a necessity for a better user experience or are just there to manipulate ranking. The algorithm is so advanced now that with all the semantic analysis at work, I think big G knows when a page is giving out relevant links or not.

    I think it is still wise to stay within the 100 link limit. Me, as a user, for example, won’t have that much time clicking and checking most of them anyway. I’d go with the Google way of just giving 10 of my most important link recommendations to whoever visits my pages. That way, I send out happier visitors out.

  44. Hi, my pages over 100links, even 200+. but there are duplicate links.
    That not for SEO but for user friendly use.

  45. Say you have a browsable directory of pages such that there is a page for every town in the US. It makes logical sense (for both users *and* crawlers) to split these up by US state, however some states have far more than 100 towns (for example, California has over 1k).

    The right thing to do here (by SEO logic) is to somehow cut down these number of links, but I wonder if this is the right user experience?

    For example, in the California example I mentioned above, would it really make a better user experience to have 10 California pages (and make users figure out your pagination scheme) or just a single California page with all the links and perhaps anchors to navigate around the list? This prevents having to load multiple pages (if the user doesn’t figure out the pagination scheme at first) and the savvy user would also be able to use the browser’s “Find” tool. Also worth noting, a list of cities like this can be kept well under the 100kb limit (the one I have in mind is only 22kb).

    The problem in that scenario is that while having 1k links on the page can actually be a better user experience, I wonder if the Google-bot would pay attention to all of them. It also, as you mention, spreads the page rank allocation very thinly (though in my particular case, this is of no concern as the child pages that are being linked to actually have higher page rank than this directory page).

    So, my question can be summed up as: What is the cost vs benefit of adding pagination criteria (and thus additional pages) just for the sake of keeping links ‘crawler-consumable’? I obviously want the crawler to pay attention to all the links, but in order to do seems to require going against what is (in my mind) the better user-experience.

    Thoughts anyone?

  46. I think that more than 100 outbound links are normal when they appear in blog, reviews website or open source website. When there is a possibility to discuss the topic and to share some interesting information, opinions. But when your website has static pages, for example, if it’s a corporate website, and it has more than even 20 outbounds, then it looks like a spammy website, or website for linking.
    I don’t know for sure whether Google divides websites on different categories (blogs, company websites and so on), I think it does, but I know for sure that you should try to take a happy mean there. Ya, think of purpose of a page, and you’ll be fine.

  47. Martรญn Almazรกn

    Useful links pages are single page listings that let you find what you are looking for quickly. And they would normally have hundreds of links.

    I have a links page that extremely popular within its subject matter for being really fast and useful, and it has over 1000 links.

    I could break it down by letter or something line that, that that would make it a lot less useful.

    Should I sacrifice usefulness and convenience?

  48. OK, but what if your site home page is a free “adult” link page like mine. I have well over 200 links, internal and external. As for user experience, that is what the users of my site are looking for.

    Also, my home page is just over 300K so is it being truncated? All of my external links are no followed anyway. It just seems like 100 links is a little out dated with the attention spans of users these day.

    I do try to play inside the g-rules as much as I can, but at some point we have to think of the actual user and not the SEs.

  49. I never have that many links! I’m thinking the most I ever use is around 15. It’s still nice to know Google will cache and index more if I need to use more.

    I’m wondering does having to many links on the page hurt the importance of each link?

    You shoudl get the e-mail notification mod for people that leave questions inside their replies.

    I would like to subscribe…

  50. Here’s a scenario – Say you have 10 links from your homepage to your subpages – now lets say you have 2 (out of those 10) links that point to the same sub-page.

    Maybe you have a link on the left hand side of your site with some basic navigation, but maybe within the text of your content it’s appropriate to link again to that subpage.

    Is that subpage with the two links now getting two ‘votes’? Or does it count as one, in terms of passing pagerank and weight?

  51. I also have a Usa niche directory and have way over a 100 links on over many pages. But It is so user friendly this way. They click on state abbreviation and it takes htem down the page to the state and all cities in those states.

    I guess I just fall into the cracks as one of the exceptions.

    No matter how many sitemaps I have given to google a lot of pages and they never get indexed.

    The site has strong PR but inner pages have been a issue.

    I have tried everything I know of and researched it to death.

  52. Thanks for clarification, 100 seems reasonable for a user-friendly site. Where is the line that one can cross for it to be recognized as spamming? As previously mentioned, most blogs do have a lot of links coming from home page.

  53. I think so many people over think SEO on their site when it comes to how many this, how many that, etc.: What I like about this post is you keep referring to the user experience….. A site with a billion text links can’t be pretty or useful for an end user! IMHO that should truly be the focus and the rest (traffic, rankings, etc.) should come naturally.

  54. Ok so many links isn’t necessarily bad,but you spoke about dilution of pagerank with many outgoing links.So how do I figure the best balance of linking out to relevant quality sites?
    Thanks Matt!

  55. I’m still relatively new to Google and SEO, so i’m delighted that i found Matt Cutts blog! Can’t believe it’s taken me this long to find but there you go. This is the first post i’ve read and already i’ve learned something.

    I agree the user is the most important concern in web design and SEO. I was a bit worried because our company provide many services and has lots of pages, and I felt that every page should be kinked to from the homepage to help with SEO. But that would mean the homepage being saturated with links, so now i’ve split the site in to sections. With the main link to each section on the homepage, then additional links on the section page. Hopefully this means more PR spreading to the section pages. But i do wrry my deeper links won’t get ranked well..

    So much to think about with SEO.. my head hurts!!

    Thanks Matt for proving this blog

  56. I just read the topic and I am wondering, what is your insight on Mega DropDown menus that where endorsed by Jacob Nielsen at useit.com?

    I am currently working on a project where the top menu is based on Mega DropDowns and the menu itself has over 70 links.

    I believe the average links per page will be between 115 and 130. Could this affect the website ranking although will benefit the user navigation of the site?

  57. Hi Matt!

    I was wondering, and it may be a dumb question and I’m sorry if it is but… Does the 100 links include navigation links. What I mean by that is I have a navigation bar on the left that has links to within my site, and that navigation bar appears on my link exchange pages. Should I divide the link exchanges between more pages so that my navigation links and the link exchanges together equal 100 or less links?

    Thank you so much for your help and time!

    Sincerely,
    Diane Dennis

  58. Matt you post clarifies in a perfect way how a clean site hierarchy with an easily understood navigation structure can benefit both usability and SEO. Great job and thanks!

    But I have a question, which I am going off-topic.

    Lets take for example a deep page. That page has 3 links pointing to the homepage.

    1. Logo
    2. Main Navigation
    3. Breadcrumb

    I assume I should not add the nofollow attribute in the main navigation link. But I could add the nofollow to the linked logo. But what about the breadcrumbs? If I would add the nofollow there too, wouldn’t that have any negative effect?

    Thanks in advance.

  59. An essential post for anyone who is linkbuilding, and the 100 links per page is something I have definitely sat up and taken notice of.

  60. Hi Matt,

    I know I am kinda late to jump into this debate lol but I was wondering if the below 100 links per page rule applies to e-commerce sites too? If an e-commerce site has more than 1000 links on a page with all links organized into appropriate categories using CSS tree-view menus for a good user experience, how does Google differentiate it from another site with 1000s of uncategorized links providing a bad user experience? I guess both pages would appear the same to Google spider right? Does Google has a way to distinguish between sites based on page design?

    I am sure your answer to my question would help a lot of e-commerce site owners ๐Ÿ™‚

    Regards,
    Vaibhav

  61. hi,
    good question Vaibhav. Everythings whats good for human is ok and this should be the sum up. Lets say at universities’ pages with jobs or general links sections. There are sometimes hundreds of external links, they are usefull and point students places which are necessery for them. The web sites are going well.

  62. Hello Matt,

    I am rather a novice in linking matters and would be grateful if you could answer a question closely related to the topic of how many links per page. I have a site for camping in France which is a camping guide really, and I have been offered a sitewide link from another similar but non competing site. Is there any harm in a site wide link, and could either site be penalised by Google or other SE’s?

  63. I feel it’s quite silly to want to determine “how many links a page can have” as in my earlier comment, any publisher out there is free to do what he/she wants on their site, and if a user finds the site un-user friendly, he/she will not cast his/her vote (by closing the browser or not visiting the site again).

  64. is there any consensus on the question whether it is good or bad to have dense inside linking (relative to the site size, not just the absolute number per page) within your website (or across multiple websites) and what internal linking structure is good? (if I imagine a site as a tree graph, then is it better to link along the edges of the tree (plus maybe to the root from every page) or should I make the linking structure much more dense (say adding several times more inner links to the tree structure that wouldn’t just go along the edges)?)
    for example, for my emerging language learning site, I am considering whether to link from all the verbs in the vocabulary section to their conjugation, and back from the conjugated verbs to the vocabulary sections that contain them etc. does it do any good/harm to seo? thanks.

  65. Hi, matt
    I wanted to ask that…Is it good and safe SEO if I put 4-5 Backlinks in one blog post having around 400 words? All 4-5 backlinks are pointing to my 1 website only.
    Does google will count all 4-5 backlinks??

  66. Hey Matt

    Very informative post. I’d been wondering about this same question for a few days – I a relative newcomer on onling stuff.

    What was interesting to me was the dilution of PR due to the number of outbound links. I also came across this interesting post on the calculation of page rank by Bob Wakfer. Not sure I understand it fully though.
    His calcs don’t seem to mention dilution of page rank but I guess you’d take his calc and divide it by 100 to get the page rank deliverd by an outbound link.

  67. If my web page had a random link to another page (a flash game will refer to another flash game), what is going to happen?

  68. In my option, too much links on a page is not good to the users. So, 100 links on a page is already a big number.

  69. a person who is adding more than 100 links on a page might be creating a directory or might not know all about page rank and yes i do have seen pages with good page rank & many many links. How about a new post on the topic of usefulness of directories?

  70. Great post thanks for all the comments too. I have been wondering about this subject for some time, specifically with regards to user sitemaps (as opposed to XML sitemaps) I have read the “SEO” rants about splitting up the sitemap page and too steer PR but the whole process still seems contrived to me.

    Now from a purely webmastery perspective I think in some cases it’s perfectly “reasonable” outside of Googles recommendations on links to post an html page with 1k up links. High speed web, mootools and a bunch of ajaxy coolness permit webmasters to be quite creative in presenting large link lists in a userfriendly happy manner.

    Although in respect to a “sitemap” it’s quite a tricky tradeoff. I have high traffic sites that users generally land on the home page to complete their CTA and if they want to drill in, they want to do it quick and easy. Global navigation 2 the sitemap page faciltates this nicely, splitting out to 50x SEO sitemaps does not. ok ok rel no follow an no index, steer the bots is hack a solution? but I think G bot should be smart enough to identify a “sitemap” page and exempt it from the spammy region of the nether index. Or at least not let it effect the rest of the sites content goodness.

    It’s just my view, perhaps unfounded, maybe a thought to ponder.

  71. Thanks for posting this Mr. Cutts! This post is a gem and eases my anxiety. Keep up the necessary web tips, everyone appreciates them.

  72. Thanks for helping solve some of the confusion about linking in posts.

  73. Matt, havenโ€™t counted, but I bet you blog home page has more than 100 links ๐Ÿ™‚

  74. Hi Matt,

    With changes to SEO best principles and sites constantly updating with new features (and inevitabley more links), do you think this 100 links per page is still as big an issue?

    Only reason for asking is that we recently introduced a mega navigation drop down system on our website and there didn’t appear to be any issues thrown up by our developers when this was going live. If anything we are seeing Google crawl our home page per often! Surely this is a good thing or do you think it’s a case that Google is struggling to crawl the entire page?

  75. Its funny how there are so many people interested in SEO just so they can figure out how to spam their way to the top. Spam is SEO’s worst enemy and what makes it so hard.

  76. My site has a lot of links in the sidebar that displays them all when you hit the tab… That does not count as hidden, correct? its just the templet layout

  77. If the links are mainly internal (such as on e-commerce Sites) is this still an issue? I just just totted up the links per page on a few e-commerce sites, and they are going well over 100?

  78. A few of my websites have more than 100 internal links. They are e-commerce sites. have no problem with users. But will there be any problem when Google crawls them?

  79. Thanks for the post, we have just changed our menu structure from one showing every sub category of product in the menu to one that now only shows the top level categories. This has reduced our internal links on every page by a dramatic number and it will be interesting to see how both users and also the search engines react to the change (hopefully it will all be positive)

    Best Regards

    Jason

  80. I know sites like Digg, Reddit, etc have tons of links on them and they seem to do just fine. I agree that it is just a general recommendation. If the user experience is not acceptable, then your site will suffer in more ways than just SEO.

  81. We have seen some of the site has more than 1oo links and they will get good traffic(we checked compete.com) through search engines.

  82. What would be the proper way to have a page with 100+ links (or IMG tags) to images in the HTML that are before the main text content of the page? (Everyone entering a web gallery wants to see the images first)

    This is a typical situation of a slideshow gallery (e.g. jquery based) that has great usability and gives good user experience.

    Will this introduce a problem for indexing the page text content (placed after the images) and will all the IMG’s be indexed by the image bot (if they have proper ALT text and filenames)?

  83. It is good to hear this from you. Thank you for sharing your good tips. In my case it is an online directory so it is all about links but how many was the Q? Now I know what to do to it better.

  84. I still can’t understand why there are supposed to be under 100 links. Because google will not index them, or because will index some of them? Or it will give our site a penalty? Why?

  85. mmmโ€ฆ well over 100 links kind of like a blog post. Okay, so most blogs automatically nofollow links. But I find often that many of the links on a post can lead to the discovery of a good site.

  86. Was reading an article from SEOmoz and i got here from there, i think the 100 link rule is still very useful. You have to go over that only if you are a directory site or putting up a list..

  87. Hey that’s really handy information. I always wondered how many links were too many, especially on the homepage of a site. Thank you

  88. Thanks Matt for useful information. For dynamic portal, I need to showcase more than 100 links means, How can i measure that which links for omitted by search engine. Is any measure tool that find out omitted links by Search Engines.. Please help on that.

  89. Great – have become aware of this being an issue – but good to know it’s not an automatic spam trigger – will now get looking at on site usability to try and get the count a bit lower!

  90. I think that for this metric to make sense, one needs to differentiate between internal links and external ones. Internal links are often used to great benefit for navigational purposes (esp. with CSS formatting). My site has 102 links per page just for navigating, and one of the most common feedback comments I receive is how easy it is to navigate the site. I agree that having too many outbound links is suggestive of problems (unless the page is explicitly a link list page of some sort), but to lump internal and external links together in a single metric is a mistake, in my view.

  91. Thank you, Matt. The reason I came across the post is people saying that any page with over 100 links triggest a spam alert with Google. There’s also a few auto site checks that still mention this as a factor affecting rankings. ‘cmon it’s 2011, when will we learn to pay attention. I’m glad to see it doesn’t. I’ll make sure to keep it under for usability purposes.

  92. I think I will work on my startpage to have not more than 100 links – guiding the visitors to special sections deeper into the site.

  93. i have been told that 25 links is a ideal for a page

  94. We have over 24,000 medical products, which means on our “Products A to Z” page contains well over 100 links directing users to various product categories; although if the list was sectioned by each letter and spread across multiple pages, it may cause difficulty for the user to find a medical products by category name.
    quickmedical.com/sitemap/medical-equipment-supplies-list-products.html

  95. Hello Matt,

    Are internal links okay? As I’m worried my site will face problems when Google looks at my linking as there are going to be over 100 links on menu on the left, or does this policy/guideline only really apply to external links? I’m trying to keep external links to the bare minimum apart from helpful comments or useful resources.

    But I guess if Google only looks at external link’s what happens to those who redirect them before leaving the site? (Such as you see /go/shorturl)

  96. Hi Matt Cutts,

    Now,Google will index more than 100K of a page. So, we can use more than 100 links on our site if it is Perfect without Spamming. but, the PageRank of that page divided as numder of links , so each link has got less amount of PageRank. it means if we want high page rank of our site So, we have put less number of links on site….. Right????

  97. I placed a comment on this page and my name (DAVE) links to my homepage (www.writeahead.co.nz). I have been told that my comment is spammy. I have never done anything spammy before and in fact frown upon anyone that does. How can I have my comment removed?

  98. Thanks Matt, Well this is interesting, I think sites with too many links on pages might consider categorizing and sub categorizing products.

  99. Dear Matt,
    plz answer this question.

    //But what about blogs ? Many times a blog can easily exceed the 100 barrier with tags, archives, categories, frequent used tags, article links, blogrolls, adds. The 100 limit made me to drop the widget that showed my frequent used tags. I just hope that Google takes into account this matter with blogs.//

  100. really helpful information but what i was wondering was if 100 links are advisable and there are 490 internal links on a webpage which ones would be crawled first?

  101. Thanks for this useful but sometimes confusing information. I would have to agree that you should better categorize if you have so many links. Not only is this better usability, also its better for Search engine optimization.

  102. I write monthly a lot of posts which are visible on archive.These monthly posts from archive become internal links (maybe too many !).So , I must to not show the archive in the main page ?

  103. with over 100 links to a page what could be Google page rank? Does the total links in a page include navigation links? Do I have use “no follow” attribute to navigation links? I am not finding answers to these questions? Will you answer me please?

  104. More than 100 links.. I guess that was when the processing was to be limited and now when technology has improved and better processing achieved, more than 100 links would be allowed.
    Also, this article talks about Page Rank..but Google is not considering much of Page Rank.

    So, keeping this in mind should we go with <100 or 100+ is good as well?

  105. This is the exact article I was hoping to find. Something to explain in easy to understand language the use of links on each page (or overuse), and the possible effects on ranking, Customer useability.

  106. I believe the main point to take a look at is how the actual links are being set out. If spaced out in the correct fashion, it can make 1000 links look less spammy than 500 perhaps.

  107. Good to know. Some directories might have trouble following this protocol. It will force all websites to focus on the exact content and subjects of that page instead of a general resources page scattered with over 1,000 links.

  108. I think that sites that has too much links (let’s use the 100 rule) are more likely to be a big mess tather than a good and informative page. i would tather get more pages that are better orgenized.

  109. Thanks Matt! This is great insight to take into consideration in developing new sites, landing pages, etc.

  110. I wanted to put more than 100 links on my homepage, but it is a property site.

    I learned alot from this post ๐Ÿ™‚

  111. Hi Matt,
    I was about to change whole Website Structure to reduce number of links like <100 but when i found here that its not affect to search position its fine. I really glad to hear that.

    Thank you for providing nice information. Also @Amit Thanx for nice Charts. I do follow blog Labnol regularly.

  112. Hello Matt Sir

    I am very confuse about one thing and really can not find the correct answer for this.

    As you said too much side wide links never good. So there are 2 type of side wide links

    1. Internal (In his on site domain)
    2. External to other sites

    If a person have 4 categories page and all category page have 50 same side wide links then its good for page or not?

    As if we have a big site like jobs then we need to provide some usefull categories for jobs to user

    Sir can you clear about how many side wide internal link should have a site on multiple pages

    I find alot but none can clear me but as you are best in world so you can clear this

  113. Sir please to remember that i am talking about only Internal Same Domain Sidewide Links

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