No limits on number of internal links per page?

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

A competitor of mine who has been hovering around 8th-12th place in serps across the board has suddenly jumped to top 3 for most of our related keywords. What's of interest is that his/her pages are essentially a list of links, all leading to other pages, that tell visitors about widgets for sale.

If there are 500 of that type of widget for sale the pages have 500 links on them. One page had well over 1000 links on it yet still ranked #1 for the keyword.

As far as ranking goes it would seem that number of links on a page that lead to other pages on the same tld no longer 'weigh down' the page as they once did. The proof is in the pudding and this competitor only has link flavor. The number of words which are not a link on the page can be counted on your fingers.

[deadsea]

I've believed for a long time that it is OK to have hundreds of links per page. Google's guidance of 100 links on a page max has never had any teeth to it.

As for being able to rank with just lists of links -- I'm surprised. It doesn't sound like a great user experience. I can't imagine that somebody landing on the page from SERPs would have any better experience than somebody landing on search results or a directory page -- both of which Google tries to actively throw out of the SERPs.

[indyank]

Having them is definitely going to help, as the current google algos are looking at the web from a different perspective.

[bw100]

The site description sounds like the site has published a directory of its pages for each flavor of widget they are selling. (How close is this to their sitemap?)

This type of user experience could potentially be better than using a site search function: provides a visual representation of the quantity and variety of widgets and widget flavors available, could help the user with the correct vocabulary for the widget they want, exposes the user to other styles and flavors of widget that might be useful, and might be more efficient in getting the user to the correct page more quickly.

[Planet13]

How many pages do they have which are a list of links?

What percentage of their total pages do those link list pages make up?

Possibly related to this, I have seen pages rank well which featured a large list of links to itself, using different phrases as anchor text. So maybe there is a blip in the algo which is rewarding having lots of links on a page?

[lucy24]

Do any of g###'s techno-geeks actually use search engines? If I, as a user, want a catalog of links to other sites I will say so in my search. "widgets" and "widget links" are different things.

There are types of material which by their nature will contain thousands of internal links-- any of which could then be bookmarked and turn into external backlinks-- but they tend to be off the search-engine radar.