inbound to outbound link ratio

inbound outbound links

[Novus]

I have recently found that one of my sites easly has over 250 outbound links, all on one page! With roughly about 400 inbound links.(to various pages)

I started to cull some of the outbound links due to sites not being online anymore etc, and I rel_nofollow'ed some links that were less than relavent.

Which got me to thinking; Is there any reason why I could'nt just rel_nofollow every link on the page?

My director occaisionlly sends me links to add but id really rather not add anymore. If rel_nofollow" causes search engine to ignore a link, does it matter how many outbound links are included on a page?

My current train of thought is; Logically speaking authoritive site will tend to have more inbound than outbound.

So should it be a consideration?

[BenFox]

Search engines don't totally ignore links with a nofollow - they still crawl them, they know they're there and they still affect PR calculations.

Why are all those links on one page anyway?

[Planet13]

If rel_nofollow" causes search engine to ignore a link, does it matter how many outbound links are included on a page?

100% of wikipedia's outbound links are nofollow, so if the question is whether too many outbound links with nofollow attribute is harmful, I don't think that it is.

and I apologize in advance if that was not your question.

[Novus]

Why are all those links on one page anyway?

The company I work for purchased the this site a couple of years ago, way before my time. It wasnt built "professionally" it was a fan built site. I've only now, had the time to look at it. Hence im finding issues.

In all honesty it is ranking extremely well so im a little hesitant to alter things too dramticly. Im just not happy with this links page.

I guess I should heed the old adage "if its not broke dont fix it"

100% of wikipedia's outbound links are nofollow, so if the question is whether too many outbound links with nofollow attribute is harmful, I don't think that it is.

I pretty much agree, I just wonder if there are any effect of nofollowing 200+ links all of a sudden?

[SEO_NeT]

If it ranks well and you are happy with the rankings, I would not change anything

[Trisha]

I thought the rule of thumb was that you shouldn't have more than 100 outbound links per page - has that changed? I've been away for a while.

[Novus]

I thought the rule of thumb was that you shouldn't have more than 100 outbound links per page

That’s the rule I’ve been adhering to since... forever, to the best of my knowledge it hasn’t changed. In my case I have just inherited a site that goes against that rule which is why I started this thread.

I have rel_nofollowed some of the less relevant links, I even found links to one of our competitors! We tend to bounce between 1st and 2nd with them for a very strong keyword.

I'll be keeping an eye on what happens.

[TheMadScientist]

Search engines don't totally ignore links with a nofollow - they still crawl them, they know they're there and they still affect PR calculations.

That's some really bad information...

... matt cutts made it pretty clear on a video just last month - and he was talking about nofollowed wikipedia links:

[mattcutts.com...]

...

Do they keep stats on rel="nofollow" links, just privately held data? I'm sure they do. Even in the video, Matt mentions that nofollowed links make up a very small percentage of all links on the web. So they watch it, and they know about it - they just don't evaluate urls based on it. Google doesn't even use nofollow links for url discovery.

[tedster] [webmasterworld.com...]
Google does NOT use nofollow links.

The only way a nofollow link 'counts' at all is as a link on the page to prevent PR sculpting, so if you have 10 links on a page and nofollow 5 of them, the 5 followed links do not pass extra weight. That's it. That's all. Nothing else.

[Trisha]

Novus - for the less relevant links, couldn't you just put them on a different page? Like at the bottom of the page put a link that says 'more information' or something like that - and put those links on that other page?