Does Google penalise for too many internal links? I got a message in WMT.

[endomorph1]

I have just logged onto webmaster tools and there was a message about one of my sites saying that there were too many links and this may cause problems for Googlebot.

It lead me to [google.com...] for more information

The site has non of the causes listed, it just has a LOT of pages and each page is linked to within the site.

My question though is will I be penalised by Google for this ?

All the pages are good, unique content.

The site in question has been my saving grace as it is serving Adsense and I am now up from £1k per month to £4k per month. So understandably I am concerned about loosing things.

Things seem to be slow today on Adsense, but I know I shouldnt look at the day until tomorrow. I'm just a born worrier !

Any advice greatfully received to put my mind at rest.

[aristotle]

How many internal links go out from a typical page?

[tedster]

My question though is will I be penalised by Google for this ?

If you mean will your natural rankings be automatically demoted by some amount, then I'd say the answer is no. Rather Google is warning you about a problem that can make natural ranking difficult for you.

The Google information page you linked to is about "too many URLs" - and that's not the same as "too many links". I would suggest looking very closely at the situation and seeing what URLs googlebot is picking up.

[endomorph1]

Pages have no more than 100 - and they are sitemap pages

[tedster]

Then you don't have "too many links" - but somehow Google is finding "too many URLs" - that's an important difference. I'd suggest going through that page they linked you to very carefully, and looking at the URLs that Google has indexed to see what kind of things they are finding.

A couple big questions:

1. Does your 404 error handling actually return a 404 status in the http header?
2. Does your site expose search results to indexing?

[limoshawn]

Just throwing this out there: are any of your pages auto-generated, any script generated links on/to your pages. If so could one of those scripts be broke and trapping the googlebot in a loop of auto-generated links, an unintended black-hole?

[tedster]

These notices are apparently part of a new Google message program they are calling "SiteNotices" - just included in Webmaster Tools.

Continuing with our effort to provide useful and actionable information to webmasters, we're now sending SiteNotice messages when we detect a significant increase in the number of crawl errors impacting a specific site. These notifications are meant to alert you of potential crawl-related issues and provide a sample set of URLs for diagnosing and fixing them....

We hope you find SiteNotices helpful for discovering and dealing with issues that, if left unattended, could negatively affect your crawl coverage.

[googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com...]
So it's not about a potential penalty - but it is about a crawling problem that can affect how well your content gets spidered.