Can 'excessive DOM size' issue lead to massive URL unindex by Google

[guarriman3]

Can 'excessive DOM size' problem lead to massive URL unindex by Google?

I had some webpages that list 7k-9k URLs each one, with the following structure for each link:

<a href="url">Product name</a><br/>

To add information for users, I included the price of the products after the name:

<a href="url">Product name</a> <span class="pricetext">(price)</span><br/>

If I analyze the page with PageSpeed, I get the following 'excessive DOM size' message:

Total DOM Elements ... 8,825

Maximum DOM Depth... 7

Maximum Child Elements .... 3,882

After the addition of the price, I found that Google suddenly started to unindex hundreds of the URLs of my website. I have some questions:

is it possible that the addition of the price could lead to an excessive DOM size (and a rendering issue), that made Google to unindex the URLs?

which alternatives may I use to list the 7k-9k URLs?

are there tools to analyze this, apart from PageSpeed?

Thank you!

[tangor]

Yikes! Since "forever", the usual guide is no more than 100 links per page. G indicates they can do "hundreds", but this example is "thousands".

Suggest breaking those massive lists up into something more manageable, both for the user AND g!

[tangor]

Aside: I have two pages with over 100 links, but less than 200 for the last 20 years and no problems in that regard.

HOWEVER, when either of those two pages START to go higher I break out a related section to a new page and just leave a link behind on the larger list to the new "index/category/whatever" page.

[lucy24]

Never mind indexing. How long does it take the average human browser--especially a human who has never visited the site before--to load a page with eight thousand elements, to a depth of seven? (How?!) Do they even stick around to see if the page is worth viewing when it finally shows up?

[tangor]

Good question! Guess it depends on the speed of the connection. I've dialed back to 100mb/s for the price and most times see no lag, even on complex and "large" pages, but I do remember when my 6mb/s ADSL connection seemed frozen from time to time!

Whew!