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How Many Links Per Page Is Best for Google?

In a recent post on his blog, Matt Cutts revisits the old Google recommendation that web pages stay under 100 links per page.

Initially, Google recommended this because they could only index a maximum of about 100 kilobytes of a single page. With a boatload of outgoing links, they wouldn’t be able to handle the entire load.

But now Google can index well over 100K per page. So why not load ‘em up?

First of all, pages loaded with links are often pass on very little PageRank. If you are interested in passing on more PageRank to certain pages than others, then you should either nofollow them or get rid of them entirely. This is important in terms of internal linking and PR sculpting: your internal links you are counting on will get watered down with a lot of other noise.

Cutts goes on to state that not all pages with hundreds of links are necessarily spammy or necessarily bad for the user experience. Google will not automatically dock you if there are a ton of links, unless there’s a lot of hidden text or other trickery.

In fact, many of the top sites on the internet have as many as 1000 links on their homepages and don’t seem to be seeing any negative effect from Google. Huffington Post can run 700+ links on it’s homepage regularly and has a PageRank of 8.

Essentially, as Cutts says, as long as the “user experience” of a page isn’t compromised, Google is fine with a ton of links. So link away, people: just remember that with every link, PageRank is that much more watered down.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 10th, 2009 at 11:44 amand is filed under Search Engine Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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