How Far Into Source Does Google Notice Links?

I read something about 600 lines, is that still right?

[onlineshrine]

I have someone who I am providing free service for in exchange for text links to my site on every page of his site. He put the links on line 900 or so of most of his pages. I am wondering if the links will still be noticed in Google? It is a good cause so it is not terrible if the links don't garner any Google benefit, but it would be a nice thing if they did.

Does anyone know how far line-wise into the source code Google will notice links?

[conor]

Google will index the first 100K of a page, however it will 'read' the entire page.

[Gory]

You should post up to 101 links on a page. I think it is safe to asume Google will index this. More than this and you stand a chance that not all links on that page will be indexed.

[caveman]

>>You should post up to 101 links on a page.

Sorry, but no. GG has made it clear. Think in terms of page size. Keep it less than 100K if you want the links to be indexed. The number of links has little or nothing to do with it.

There is some evidence of links indexed past the limits, but I wouldn't count on it.

[SyntheticUpper]

A link and brief description only needs a few bytes.

You can get hundreds of links onto one page, and stay under the 100k canonical limit.

Link all these pages together, and point them at expert niche sites.

This way, you can suck the blood out of quality sites, and get a great Google ranking.

Sounds too good to be true? Confused? At the 'Plex it's called 'progress'

[Herenvardo]

>>You should post up to 101 links on a page.

Sorry, but no.

Even when there is no links limit, you should know that, in terms of PR, as less links the best.
A page with a lot of links won't pass too many PR, so G has not to care about not counting it.
So ensure that files are not bigger than 100k and try to get links from files without too many outbound links.

Herenvardö

[internetheaven]

For best coverage (user orientated) and quicker indexing I keep under 100 links on a page for sitemaps. This is also good practice for maximum spread of PageRank. I can't think of a reason you would have much more than 100 on any page that is offering unique content to Google.

I also read that Google only cached 100k when Yahoo (Tim) was boasting about their new Yahoo crawler's 500k abilities.

That estimate is old though and was probably used to deflect some of the grief Tim was getting over SiteMatch. Google does cache more than 100k, I'm not sure what their current limit is but there are many, many pages cached in Google results well over the 100k limit. (That's not the page size noted next to the results, but the actual size of the cache)

<added>I thought I'd better add before someone points it out - I don't advise creating pages over the 100k limit. It seems recently that anything over 60K in most instances has trouble ranking high. (as far as I can see)</added>

[bull]

I currently have a directory-like 'index' page with about 160 links to single pages with unique content. All of them are doing very fine, even those at the bottom of the page.
There is no 100 link limit.

[newsphinx]

Here is what Google says:

Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

[google.com ]

[powerofeyes]

Google is known to follow more than 3000 links per page(provided the page is less than 101k), But as always the damping factory of Google PageRank comes into play, For good PR distribution 100 links per page is a good option,

[IITian]

Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

A couple of months ago I got a link from a page containing about 700 links. The same day Googlebot visited my site and has been visiting it daily and crawling all pages since then.

[GoogleGuy]

Good posts from everybody, but caveman nailed what I would have said..