100 link "limit" on google

I think it's kind of arbitrary and wrong

[Clark]

Different sites work different ways and I think that a "cap" of 100 before google "penalizes" the site is wrong...here are some popular sites culled from alexa and their link count (based on Opera's Links in frame, I may be missing some if there are any frames):

go.com->71
amazon.com->175
ebay->121 home page but clicking on Home reveals 286
Microsoft->110 (but who knows how well opera counted those js links)
Passport.net->27
Alexa->107
Google->12 (kinda makes u understand where they got the idea)
MSN.com->194

---
Now depending how you look at it, 3 major sites out of 8 would have pages downgraded somewhat because of their number of links.

I usually agree with the reasons for Google's algo, and I understand they like (and promote?) simplicity of design. Perhaps they feel if they can keep their number of links down, why can't everyone else? But I just think the web has all kinds of styles and uses and shouldn't be considered less relevant because of they more than 100 links.

[JLindsay]

The suggestion made by Google should not be taken as an order and therefore webmasters should not be too worried about going over the 100 links 'limit' if there is a good reason for doing so.

We have a specific topic links page on our site with over 150 links and the page has a PR5 (our homepage is PR6). In fact, if you search for link:www.ourcompanyname.com on Google the first page it pulls up in the SERP is the links page!

(On a related note, maybe this gives credence to the argument/hub theory that Google does actually give some weight and value to relevant outgoing links!)

[vitaplease]

.. before google "penalizes" the site is wrong

Clark,

I think they mention guidlines, not penalties.
[google.com...]

I also think they mentioned it in case your sitemap has a too low Pagerank

also mentined here:

[webmasterworld.com...]

[chiyo]

I dont think G said they penalized pages with over 100 links, just that they may stop indexing crawled links on one page after 100. They still crawl the whole page (within reason i guess), but they may not index all the links after 100.

Anyway that was my understanding.

Seems pretty sensible to me. It means they dont use time indexing lots of links that only deserve one in more than 100 on one page.

So if a site only lists a link on ONE page with over 100 links, they are basically saying that link aint that important really!

And the likelihood of pages with over 100 links including spam or just reciporcal links for marketing/PR reasons gets progressively higher I think, though as you say some sites may have legtimate reasons for doing it.

In the latter case, if a link is "important" to the site, it should also be included in other pages of the site, with less links per page, therefore increasing it's importance to the site as a whole.

I think its an important part of their algo's ability to reduce spam and give more weighting to links that are more important to the site, as the site sees it.

[brotherhood of LAN]

I dont think G said they penalized pages with over 100 links, just that they may stop indexing crawled links on one page after 100. They still crawl the whole page (within reason i guess), but they may not index all the links after 100.

A side question I wonder about is what happens when a low PR is passed through many links on the page. How many decimal places are they are they going to leave aside for its PR?

Low PR / Lots of links = 0.0000001
or
Higher PR / Lots of Links 0.33

Perhaps there is a threshold where the PR is so low its not stored and passed on. Just a suggestion on top of the answers already given :)

[vitaplease]

Just my own experience:

I have several site maps on my site:

- one (high PR6) with aprox 170 links - all links show as back links
(if a page only gets a backlink from this sitemap it still shows a PR5)

- one (low PR6) with approx. 270 links - not all links show as back links, Google only shows the backlink if the page itself has a PR of 4+.
But all linked to pages are indexed in Google, even the 260'tiest link towards a PR3 page, where that page only gets a link from this sitemap.

Conclusions for me:

- 100 links is a well meant guideline for sitemaps with low Pagerank, to prevent the linked to pages not being indexed because of low pass-through Pagerank.
- Backlinks of PR6 (or PR4+) pages only show (at least internally) if they pass enough Pagerank for a page to be a PR4 on its own merit because of that link.
(that could answer some of the questions, I have a PR6 link towards my page, but it does not show?)

[ciml]

I am convinced that there is a number of links beyond which less raw PR is handed on than the raw PR of the linking page divided by the number of links.

Google mention 100 as a guide on their Webmaster pages, but has anyone narrowed the threshold any better than "between 64 and 256?"

> Backlinks of PR6 (or PR4+) pages only show (at least internally) if they pass enough Pagerank for a page to be a PR4 on its own merit because of that link.

That should be possible to test in a repeatable manner. If a PR4 page has a link from a page that passes on PR4, and another link from a page that passes on PR3, then do they both show?