Google On Limiting Links

Matt Cutts Talks Keeping Links to Under 100 a Page

As you may or may not be aware, Google recommends keeping the number of links on any given page to under 100. This recommendation can be found among Google’s webmaster guidelines under the Design and Content Guidelines section.

Matt CuttsGoogle’s Matt Cutts took the opportunity to explain the reasoning behind this suggestion. He says that originally Google would only index 100kb of a page, and pages with larger amounts of links ran a higher risk of not being indexed entirely.

Google will now however index more than 100kb, but the recommendation remains, and the reason is user experience. The general thinking as Cutts presents it is that users don’t like pages with a lot of links.

He says that in some cases it makes sense to have over a hundred links. Don’t worry, Google does not automatically consider that spam. Still, he notes that such pages can be spammy, "especially if the links are hidden or keyword-stuffed."

Sidenote: While on the topic of linking, there is another interesting story about linking practices being threatened in this exclusive discussion between legal experts:

"If you end up with hundreds of links on a page, Google might choose not to follow or to index all those links," explains Cutts." At any rate, you’re dividing the PageRank of that page between hundreds of links, so each link is only going to pass along a minuscule amount of PageRank anyway. Users often dislike link-heavy pages too, so before you go overboard putting a ton of links on a page, ask yourself what the purpose of the page is and whether it works well for the user experience."

To me, it’s going to come down to personal judgment. Use links where they make sense and you’ll probably be fine on the user experience level. Linking for linking’s sake is probably where might start turning people off.

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About Chris Crum
Chris Crum has been a part of the WebProNews team and the iEntry Network of B2B Publications since 2003. Follow WebProNews on Facebook or Twitter. Twitter: @CCrum237 StumbleUpon: Crum Google: +Chris Crum

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8 Responses to Google On Limiting Links

  1. GregC says:

    I would go ahead and add more pages and split those links out,

  2. I am assuming this doesn’t apply to chinese & japanese websites as having less links is actually less user friendly in the chinese and japanese markets.

    Then again, that maybe one of the reasons why Google doesn’t dominate the asian markets.

  3. jack says:

    Google should consider increasing links for page to dominate Asian market. Too many links sometimes is annoying but you can choose from the links you want to check.

  4. Certain pages are just going to have more links than others, like sitemap pages, home pages. Keep in mind your website visitors and try to make navigation easy without over doing links. We have long pages so its only natural to have sidebar links as well as links at the bottom so its easier for people to get to where they want to be. Consider your visitors and you should keep Google happy too.

  5. Dose people always like to click

  6. Hotels says:

    Many websites on the internet use lots and lots (over 200) links on their homepage and have no problems getting spidered.

  7. This is a well known fact. We should also make sure the html or web page file doesn’t exceed 100KB.

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