Google Webmaster Guidelines

fewer than 100 links

[DotBum]

Hi Guys,

I have recently had a couple of webmasters email me about changing the format of their links pages because of this line in the google webmaster guidelines:

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

I've had a search on this site and can't find any discussion on the subject. I just wanted to ask your thoughts on:

-How strict this guideline is?
-How new is it?
-Has anyone been adversely affected by it?
-Is this outbound links only or internal linking too?

I currently have over 200 outbound links on one page and want to know how seriously to take this! The implication from one webmaster was that any page with over 100 links would simply not be indexed by google in future.

Cheers,
Niall

[korkus2000]

Here is some thoughts on it.
[webmasterworld.com...]

I think it is a guideline to have PR propagate over all of the links. Over a hundred links and the PR passed will be quite low.

[europeforvisitors]

I don't think Google has said what it does with pages of more than 100 links, but the most likely scenario is that googlebot will stop crawling the page and following links after it's digested the first 100...just as it reportedly doesn't crawl text after 100 Kb.

Since nobody knows for sure, why not cover all contingencies by splitting that massive 200-link page into several shorter pages? Shorter pages would also have the advantage of being friendlier to the reader (which may be why Google suggests limiting pages to 100 links--after all, Google likes pages that are designed for readers.)

[BigDave]

If they have a hard limit that they will crawl, it will be somewhere above 100 links, so that there is a safety margin between what they say and where they stop. I can verify that they follow at least 127 links, as some of my pages wold not have made the index if they did not.

I bet it is just that they think it is just annoying web design to have many more links than that on a page, and at some point, well above 100 links they will ding your page for it as one that users would probably wish to avoid.

[DotBum]

Hi Guys,

Thanks for all the feedback - my links page currently has navigation within the page - eg link to #Subject etc. but I think I'll take some good advice and break each category into separate pages. It is starting to get a little unwieldy!

Cheers,
Niall

[union_jack]

I have studied this quite closely in the last couple of weeks and I have found links pages with over 100 links or so do not register as a backward link unless you are in the first 100 links even if the page is a Pr 5 or 6. I have stopped exchanging links with sites with large links pages as I don't see any advantage. I think its a clever way to stop large link farms by Google.

[BigDave]

I just checked link #126 off of my 127 link home page and it shows 3 backlinks. My home page, another page where it is link #125 and the page below it.

It might stop somewhere past 100, but it does not stop *at* 100.

[Zapatista]

Not long ago, I started a thread on this very subject because I was tired of seeing these link farm appearance for link pages that contributed nothing with PR and made my link more difficult to find.

[webmasterworld.com...]

[coconutz]

I recently checked the backlinks from a couple of the companies participating in an online privacy seal program that are listed in the middle and near the bottom of a large alphabetical list (there's over 100 links before you get to the letter "b") of links.

The backlink shows up even though there are hundreds of links on this page. Not really sure if there is an actual cut off for the number of links on a page.

Welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com] union_jack.

[Zapatista]

DotBum,

here is the link to the Google webmaster guidelines:

[google.com...]

[union_jack]

Thanks coconutz for the welcome!
So I am now thinking the cut off point is page size and not links per page.

One other thing that was brought to mind after asking a big travel affilite to change his links page from about 500 links to smaller pages is that if you have a page like this it is to your advantage because once googlebot has stopped on the links page with 300 more links to go there is no more PR leakage but you are still recieving PR from the other 300 sites.

Anybody have any thoughts!

[steveb]

There is a page that has about 1000 links on it. The first 600 or so show as backlinks. The rest don't show at all. When you look at where the page does show as a backlink the size of the page is listed as 101k. The page is actually 150k. Looking at the cache of the page you see it cuts off in the middle of the "P" listings. All the A-O backlinks show, plus the few P ones that make the cut.

It answers the question pretty definitively to me.

[DotBum]

SteveB,

Thanks for that - answers my question in no uncertain terms, makes sense in line with the fact that the last link on my links page (#240ish) gets credited by google.

Zapatista - cheers for the link but I wasn't divinely inspired when I quoted the page at the start of this thread ;)

I think I'll still break down the links page (it's currently at 50k) as I worry that linking to bookmarks within a page may be slightly confusing to visitors - but that's another thread...

Cheers,
Niall

[ciml]

I was quite surprised when Google added that guideline to their webmaster pages. It's a quality piece of SEO advice.

Google will follow more than 100 links, but there is a number of links higher than which the PageRank transferred is much less than would be expected.

[annej]

If all your links have a brief description of the site they point to even 100 would be mind-boggling. Yet if your links are really for your readers a description makes all the difference.

It seems to me even from a SEO point long lists don't make sense. I visualize all these long lists of reciprocal links passing practically no PR benefits back and forth.

Anne

[jomaxx]

As a very general guideline it's fine, but I don't see how usability would be improved on a large site by following this rule rigidly.

Look at the Google News page in these forums. Searching the source, I found 285 "<A HREF" links! And yet the page is amazingly straightforward to use. Hardly mind-boggling.

If your goal is just to optimize for search engines by channeling PR in certain directions, optimizing anchor text and so on, I suppose this wouldn't be the best way to go. But for making a large site comprehensible via a site map, for example, I'll take too much information on a page compared to too little every time.

[wellnesscafe]

I'm concerned because I have about 100 internal links in the side column of each file to make my site very user friendly.

Also, instead of just having the file name:

<li><font size=-1><a
href="filename.htm">keywords

I have my full URL
href="http://www....domain.com/filename.htm">

I don't know if this could upset google and if I should change this.

[edited by: ciml at 11:55 am (utc) on Jan. 21, 2003]
[edit reason] Keywords generalised. [/edit]

[ciml]

wellnesscafe, I don't think it will matter if you use the full URI (http ://www.domain.com/path/filenmame.html ). The reduction in the PageRank transferred that Niall mentions is just based on the number of links on the page.

<edit>"reduction in the PageRank transferred", not "reduction in PageRank"</edit>

[wellnesscafe]

Thank you ciml. I'm also concerned about the fact that I have well over 100 links (including my own internal links) on each file. Will google penalize me for that you think?

PS My files are usually quite large with lots of info - about 140 KB.

[jomaxx]

Hi, wellnesscafe. Google will not index or cache beyond the first 101K on a page, and presumably will not see or follow links beyond that point either.

I'll let others comment on possible penalties, but the important thing to remember is that on almost every matter related to ranking and penalizing, only Google really know and they ain't talking. Everyone else is just guessing.

[ciml]

As jomaxx points out, there's a 100k limit.

As mentioned earlier, if you have more than some number of links then the PageRank transferred is much less than the normal reduction. Google themselves suggest [google.com] keeping "the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100)".

[toddb]

Do we know the 100k limit through experimentation or has google told us that? Just curious as to how solid of a limit that is. Thanks.

[Mohamed_E]

I believe that the 100K limit is fairly solid, many people have reported seeing the cached copies of larger files truncated at that point.

[raveon]

When you speak about 100K are talking about all items on the page? Including graphics? If the header graphic is 20K does that count? Or are you referring to 100K of HTML content only not counting the graphics etc.?

[toddb]

Raveon I did a search and lots of good stuff on this 100k limit here is one

[webmasterworld.com...]