I am about to publish a post with a ton of links, almost two hundred. So, before doing so, it seemed like the time had come to discuss Google’s recommendation to limit the number of links on a given page to a reasonable amount (less than one hundred).
Why do we make this recommendation and what happens if you decide to ignore it?
The original reason we made this recommendation is that Google used to only index about a hundred kilobytes per page. When we thought about how many links a page could reasonably contain while still remaining under 100 kilobytes, we felt it was right to establish a quantity of around one hundred links. If a page started to have more than this number of links, it could happen that the page was so long that Google would truncate it and not index it entirely.
Currently, Google indexes more than 100 kilobytes per page, but there’s still a valid reason to urge against exceeding one hundred links: the user experience.
If you offer more than one hundred links per page, you risk overloading your users by providing them with something unpleasant. A page might seem well-made to you until you put yourself in the user’s shoes and realize how it might appear to a new visitor.
In some cases, however, it might be appropriate to have more than one hundred links. Does Google automatically consider a page with over a hundred links as spam? No, absolutely not! The hundred-link recommendation is in the “design and content” section of the guidelines, and it’s the quality guidelines themselves that determine what we consider webspam (things like hidden text, doorway pages, self-installing malware, etc.). Can pages with more than a hundred links be considered spam? Certainly, especially if the links in question are hidden or full of keywords. However, pages with a large number of links are not automatically considered spam by Google.
So, how might Google treat pages containing more than one hundred links? If you end up putting hundreds of links on a single page, Google may decide not to follow or index all of them. In any case, you are dividing the PageRank of that page among hundreds of links, so each individual link will ultimately receive only a tiny fraction of PageRank. Users also often dislike pages overloaded with links, so before you rush in and put tons of links on a page, ask yourself what the purpose of that page is and if it serves the visitor’s situation.
Translation by Marila Giori
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