Google and the number of links on a page

Is there a limit?

[Matt Probert]

Google recommends no more than about 100 links on a single HTML page, however, my site is highly inter-linked and as such many pages have in excess of 200, 300 and even 500 links on them.

My questions are these:

1) Does Google ignore subsequent links past a certain limit, as it does lines in long pages?

2) Does Google perceive pages with "excessive" links as being link farms and penalise them?

3) Are internal links perceived differently to external links, or are both treated the same irrespective of the target domain?

Matt

[piatkow]

In reply to question 2 the answer seems to be "sometimes".

As far as I can make out there are other factors such as the ratio of content to link. I had a links page dropped from the serps while another site with more links stayed. The difference was that the other guy had a line of description between each link.

[Matt Probert]

Thanks Piatkow. None of the pages are "links pages". They all contain proper written articles, albeit somewhat short articles, in which there are links to other related articles within the site, so if an article (for example) mentions Abraham Lincoln, that text will be a link to a separate article specifically about Abraham Lincoln on another page.

From what you say, it appears that wont be penalised, none-the-less I should like a little more reassurance <g>

Matt

[Adam_Lasnik]

Matt,

Our site evaluations rarely depend upon just one black/white signal... but rather groups of many, many signals.

A page with a zillion links is probably more likely, on average, to be the sort of page which isn't very user-friendly. Other signals of such a page might make it look even more spammy, or perhaps less spammy.

On the whole, though, I'd definitely shy away from having an excessive number of links on a page.

[jetteroheller]

I have since May 2006 a link from a PR7 page to the index page of a folder having at this time PR3.

The PR7 page is from a very good domain, but on the page are 378 links.

My link is the 199 on this page.

The linked page has still only PR3.

So maybe only the first 100 links count.

[tedster]

According to the published PR forumula, the PR that gets "voted" to a target URL is divided the total number of links on the source page.

So even with PR on something like a log scale, dividing by 378 really knocks the value of that link way down. And of course you may be right -- perhaps 378 links is just over some limit, or for some reason Google has decided that page should not pass any PR at all. I've seen that with a PR8 page in the past.

[Marval]

Matt - in #1 you are making an assumption that is not a proven - that Google ignores lines in long text? There are plenty of myths going around about how many links and how long a page can be - but quite honestly every time someone posts a "supposed limit" I can come up with tons of pages that rank #1 for their targetted keyword phrase that break that "limit"

#2 and #3 wont get answered with a factual response - unless someone from Google breaks their ND agreement

[edited by: Marval at 8:01 pm (utc) on Nov. 4, 2006]