Internal linking question

internal linking

[HeyJim]

A friend claims to have a 30,000+ page website. Every page has something to do with widgets and they're all static pages. He posed a question that stumped me because of the sheer volumn of potential links and possible effects to pagerank.

1. He places his new reciprocal links page on a *different domain* and has every one of the 30,000 pages include a link to the link page. How do you think Google would respond to the website and what would happen to the domain holding the links page? Skyrocketing pagerank or trashed?

Or,

2. The links page remains on the website and has it's link on the 30,000 pages. What kind of effect do you think this would have on the sites pagerank?
Thanks for your input.

[hakre]

Hey Ho HeyJim - welcome. ;-)

the first (1) can look like a spam thingie. never heard that such a page is usefull at all. the second is quite like a sitemap which can make indexing more comfortable. but 30k links is just a big overhead even if i think a spider can handle.

why not to try both?

[dcheney]

There sheer volume of links is less important than the value of those links (aka, the PR of the page with the link on it). For example, I have a decently large site (about 23k pages) and all those pages have a common footer with about 20 internal links on it. But because many (most) of the internal pages have low PR the pages pointed to by those footer links don't get super-high PR.