"Too many on page links" phantom penalty? What about big sites?
-
So I am consistently over the recommended "100 links" rule on our site's pages because of our extensive navigation and plentiful footer links (somewhere around 300 links per page). I know that there is no official penalty for this but rather that it affects the "link juice" of each link on there. I guess my question is more about how places like Zappos and Amazon get away with this? They have WAY over 100 links per page... in fact I think that Zappos footer is 100+ links alone. This overage doesn't seem to affect their domain rankings and authority so why does SEO moz place so much emphasis on this error?
-
I can totally agree with that statement. Perhaps I misspoke. Im not asking for them to set my guidelines but rather just noting that they are pretty certain about drawing that line at 100 with their error reporting as opposed to keeping that line fuzzy like it really is.
-
I cannot speak for SEOMoz, but I personally think one of the reasons they don't tell you what a good range to have is because a lot of it comes down to your site structure as well as authority. Telling people how many they can have based on domain authority, and knowing nothing of site structure, may lead to bad practices.
Like Marcus says above:
"Now, only you can determine what a reasonable amount is for your site. If all pages have tons of authority, then great, but if not, you may want to rethink your navigation. "
-
Thanks for the reply. I guess then my question is... why doesn't SEO moz give you a range of links appropriate for your domain authority? So for example if my domain authority is 35 what range of links would be appropriate... if its 65, likewise what amount of links would be considered permissible? The reason i say range is because i know its not a hard fast rule. Its just hard to see thousands of errors glaring at you every day when in fact they may not be affecting your domain authority like they say.
-
This was a rule from back in the day when Google's advice was not to have more than 100 links per page. The thing is, whilst this exact rule is not really the case now, there is a lot of good reason not to have a link to every page on every page.
If you have this kind of huge navigation
- is it good for users? Will they really navigate through 300 odd links?
- do you really want to evenly distribute page rank across all pages in the site and indicate that each page is equally important?
Also, if all links are not getting crawled, then there is a potential for page rank distribution to be messed up with certain pages not getting anything due to the behemoth navigation.
It's important to note though, this has never been a penalty issue, it is really just a bad internal SEO (and possibly usability) issue.
This is an interesting read:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-manyAlso, you can see Google still recommend that you 'keep the links on a given page to a reasonable amount':
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769#1Now, only you can determine what a reasonable amount is for your site. If all pages have tons of authority, then great, but if not, you may want to rethink your navigation.
Hope this helps
Marcus -
The 100 links thing is more of a general recommendation than a "rule" . The answer could be different from site to site. Back in the day, this was a limit of 100 links crawled per page because Google put a cap on how much they would crawl in order to save some bandwidth.
In current times, this is more about how much domain authority your site has. If you have a lot of links, those are all going to be leeching your PR and they will all get less "juice" as the amount that flows over will keep getting divided.
Sites like Amazon and Zappos have a lot of authority and PR, therefore this is not as big of an issue to them.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Why does moz give different page authority to the same page if a visit comes from adwords vs organic search?
When clicking on an adwords ad the page the landing page has a page authority of 26. When clicking on organic search to the same exact landing page the page authority is 37. Why is this. Does moz or, more importantly Google see these as the same or separate pages? Thanks Tom
Moz Pro | | ffctas1 -
Losing links
my blog/website is at ocpatentlawyer.com. My reports are showing that I'm losing links. Is there a way to find out which links I've been losing to see if it is something that I should be concerned about?
Moz Pro | | jamesjd710 -
The pages that add robots as noindex will Crawl and marked as duplicate page content on seo moz ?
When we marked a page as noindex with robots like {<meta name="<a class="attribute-value">robots</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">noindex</a>" />} will crawl and marked as duplicate page content(Its already a duplicate page content within the site. ie, Two links pointing to the same page).So we are mentioning both the links no need to index on SE.But after we made this and crawl reports have no change like it tooks the duplicate with noindex marked pages too. Please help to solve this problem.
Moz Pro | | trixmediainc0 -
My Campaign only crawled 3 pages on my site
On my first crawl of a new campaign, the software only crawled 3 pages. XXXaceXXXscholarships.org any ideas?
Moz Pro | | Santaur0 -
Missing Page Titles On The Comptetive Link Comparison Page
Hello, When I do a Link Analysis using the SEOmoz tools I have noticed that most of the pages listed on the Top Pages tab show [No Data] for page title. Any idea why that could be? The page source of those pages have one and only one <title>tag.</p> <p>Thanks!</p></title>
Moz Pro | | andersvin0 -
Newly acquired links not showing up on link analysis
I have recently gained a few links which I know are definitly up, because I have seen them, however, when I navigate to link analysis on SEOmoz pro, the number of links isnt showing as more than before. How long does it take to update?
Moz Pro | | CompleteOffice0 -
About the rankings report in the Pro Dashboard, does it track the ranking of every page on a root domain, or just the home page or whichever page you set up the campaign with?
I noticed that one of the pages on my root domain has a #5 rank for a keyword, yet the ranking report says that there are no results in the top 50. So I am assuming it is only tracking the home page. That is one thing I liked about the Rank Tracker, that it would find any page that was ranking on a root domain. Thanks, Lara
Moz Pro | | larahill0