What is the max no. of links to a page

Do you get penalised for more?

[mikko]

I checked my web page with a meta tag analyser, the page has 104 links in total and the analyser complains that 100 should be the maximum as some search engines dont look on this favourably. Is this true?
I want to put as many pages as possible from the main page so that my ranking is one below the main page. If i then go away and create another page with more links, the page rank for the linked pages will be the main -2 (i hope you understand what i mean).

So if anyone has any feed on how to get around this or any other suggestions, i would be grateful.

[HarryM]

My suggestion is that your site has outgrown this scenario, and the PR passed down is probably diminished due to the number of links. Googleguy advised a max of 100 links on a page, although he was referring to site maps. It also must be extremely difficult to have 104 links on an index page and at the same time present an easy to follow navigation system to the user.

My approach would be to have at most a dozen highly visible links to major areas of the site as primary navigation, with up to say 30 more discreet links to sub areas. I would also add site maps referring to each individual page which helps to spread the PR.

[mikko]

My idea was as follows, only about 20 visible links to the user to make the site look not too 'busy', the rest were hidden to the user. The idea being that when Google next indexes the site, it will pick however many other pages as uniques information that when a user types certain keywords on my subject, one of these pages may have a higher chance of being found.
So far i have not been penalised by this, and any pages coming from the main page have a Pr 1 less of the main page.
Perhaps i should reduce the amount of hidden links?

[HarryM]

I didn't know you were talking about hidden links. In my book, that's spam.

[mikko]

You are maybe right about the spam. I have not added these extra links subsequently. I ended up creating another page just consisting of links, i will just have to deal with a PR -2 as putting these links visible to the user would look crowded and 'too much'.