To many links hurting me even though they are helping users

[cbielich]

I have a scrabble based site where I function as a anagram solver, scrabble dictionary look up and tons of different word lists. In each of these word lists I link every word to my scrabble dictionary. This has caused Google to index 10018 pages total for my site and over 300 of them have well over 100 links. Many of them contain over 1000 links. I know Google's and SEOMOZ stance that anything over 100 will hurt me. I have always seen the warnings in my dashboard warning me of this but I have simply ignored it.

I have posted on this Q and A that I have this issue, but IMO having these links benefit the users in the aspect that they don't have to worry about coping the text and putting it in the search box, they can simply click the link. Some have said if it helps the users then I am good, others have said opposite.

I am thinking about removing these links from all these word lists to reduce the links per page. My questions are these.

1. If I remove the links from my page could this possible help me? No harm in trying it out so this is an easy question

2. If I remove the links then I will have over 9000 pages that are indexed with Google that no longer have a link pointing to them, except for the aspect that they are indexed with Google still. Is it going to hurt me if I remove these links and Google no longer sees them linked from my site or anywhere else?

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Cesar

I have grabbed the URL from your profile and will give you some answers and suggestions as to ways to tackle this.

Firstly, can you just feed back on your goals here? What are you trying to achieve? Is it just to remove these errors in the SEOMoz tool? Or are you looking to improve the ranking of these category pages? I will assume it's a bit of both and give you some suggestions.

1. Removing the links is probably not the best approach as your are going to orphan all those children pages so they may fall out the index and like you say, it kind of works for users. That said, having so many links on the page is not great either. If this was me I would probably break things down a little further and stop having single pages doing so much work.

So, as an example:

http://www.freescrabbledictionary.com/words-with-z/

Here we have several categories and a ton of links under each category so why not put each category on it's own page? So, a page for 6 letter words with z, 5 letter words with z, 4 letter words with z etc. You could still show a sample of the words for each category but you would take the number of links right down and also possibly create some more specific and targeted landing pages for search traffic.

You already have the links to each section but they use anchors on this page rather than separate pages so that is a simple way to keep it user friendly, bag some new landing pages and take the number of keywords per page down.

Things get a bit more unwieldy when we look at the words-with-a page as opposed to the words with z as there are just so many more words (links). So, the suggestion above is still valid, but I would likely introduce some pagination as well with all the standard SEO rules of pagination applied. You have two options here with as either rel=prev and rel=next to indicate they are part of a series or rel=canonical to the first page. You would have to give this some thought as I don't know how your users arrive but I would tend to swing towards rel=next & rel=prev in this instance to show this is a series and sometimes people may want to land at page 2, 3 etc if they are looking for a specific word.

It may even be that you have the main page as a view all page and then still have pagination but the specifics depend upon what is best for your users and search.

Some good reading:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html

http://www.seomoz.org/q/pagination-ajax-rel-next-and-previous-rel-canonical-and-meta-noindex

2. Removing the links

Yeah, it will likely hurt as you are saying these pages are not important enough to have any links to them. I think the above pretty much answers this one but that is not a good idea. Just be smarter in how you link to these pages and you will be okay.

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Hope that helps!
Marcus

[gcdtechnologies]

Hi Cesar, reducing the number of links per page is probably best practice. Google may decide not to index or follow all the links, or if the anchor text is very keyword driven it may be considered spammy. Pages with 1,000 links are probably passing on very little page rank at any rate,

I do understand your point about improving the user experience, but unfortunately algorithms probably won't understand the reasons behind this.

Is there a way that you can refine/restructure the results pages so that users don't see a very long list of results/links? E.g. for a page that has 1,000 results, could you paginate according to letters of the alphabet?

1. It could possibly help you. There's no penalty for having too many links per page (unless they appear spammy), but some restructuring could ensure that internal links pass on more link juice.

2. If these pages are not linked to from elsewhere, they probably will see a drop in ranking/page authority.

Good luck!