Do I really have too many links on my startpage?
-
My site www.poker-coaching.net is built with Joomla, and I have one main menu that links all articles (app. 120) in one language from the start page. The site has a language selection menu with translations available in 4 other languages, and for each language, there are another 80 articles linked from the main page.
The SEOMOZ crawling report now say that I have too many links from the main page.
I always thought it was a good thing for SEO to have articles linked from the main page - do I need to restructure my site and start building multi-level menu structures, where I would have a main menu on the start page and the next level menu would only be shown after a user clicks on a main menu item?
-
It's complicated, but Istvan hit the core point. More links per page means each link gets less link-juice. Of course, it also means that more pages get link-juice, so it's a balancing act. I wrote about the "100 link rule" last year:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many
There's no one "right" number, and 100 isn't a hard cut-off, it's just a matter of prioritizing. I am worried that your link menus with long article names aren't very user-friendly. I'm guess that people just use the main menus and don't navigate the drop-downs. From an SEO perspective, you might be better driving link-juice to your top 10-20 articles and keeping the main navigation simpler. Again, it's a trade-off, and it really depends on your strategy, domain authority, and the relative value of these pages.
-
Hi Catfish,
The thing with the number of links is that usually having a lot of links on one site can devalue the "juice" that the article pages get from the fact that you are linking to them. I am always trying to keep the number of links on one page below 50 if that is possible, since then we target our audience better to targeted pages (and it is less confusing for the visitors).
I hope that helped,
Istvan
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
-
Listing and Linking Brands from Homepage
We have the popular brands that we sell listed on our homepage. We currently have them in just plain text at the moment but we want to know if it would be best to: Leave them in plain text Link each to the most relevant page on our website Link each out to the actual brands website Link some to internal page, others out to brands website, some blank Not have a list of brands We do have a webpage that lists all of our brands but there are hundreds we carry so we narrowed down the 40 most popular known brands that people will be looking for on the homepage. Thanks for your help!
On-Page Optimization | | petsofoz0 -
Wordpress #comment links?
We just started our trial account and have the results from our first Moz Pro Site Crawl. It's showing that we have a large portion of our pages have 'Too Many Links' and I'm trying to determine exactly what this means and how to fix it. The article referenced is from 2011 and doesn't fully address what I'm looking for. Here are a few questions: 1. Can we lower the 'link count' by adding a 'no follow' or does too many links, count links regardless? The question being, is the only way to solve this by removing links or are their no follow or no index options that will prevent us from having this issue moving forward? 2. Comment Links: Our site is in Wordpress and I just recognized that each of the comment links are followed: https://screencast.com/t/b0CIKVafWw. These aren't links from our users, rather these are links within Wordpress and are structured like this: https://mysite.com/blog-post/#comment-6970. From my screenshot you can see they are highlighted as 'followed links'. Is there a setting within Wordpress to turn this off or is there another option I should consider? Should we just make these no index, no follow links? Will that solve the 'Too many links' problem? I searched through the Q&A's and couldn't find an answer directly to my question. Most were around people leaving links in the comments section, which isn't what I'm looking for. Thank you for any help you can provide.
On-Page Optimization | | FabulesslyFrugal0 -
Disavowed links, updated website etc - still no ranking improvements
Hi, Could anyone take a look at www.artificialgrass4u.co.uk - a few years ago it used to rank highly for 'artificial grass' ... then when Google rolled out its algorithms punishing websites with poor links it lost all it's rankings. We've disavowed almost all of the bad links, and have been adding new optimised content etc over the past few months but rankings still haven't improved. Is there anything I'm missing? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | icansee0 -
Webmaster Tools - How your data is linked?
This may be an easy questions, but I can't seem to find the answer anywhere and I never really looked into it before. In google webmaster tools, in the dashboard there is the section that says "How Your Data Is Linked". What does that refer to? Is that just using internal link anchor text, external link anchor text or a combination of both? I am pretty sure that it is a combination of both, but I just want to make sure before making some internal link changes so that the most common anchor text is no longer "Prices" and "Sign up". Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | rayvensoft0 -
To Many Links On Page
I'm having a problem on a crawl warning for our main site. The warning is that every one of my pages has to many links, a little over 1,000 on almost all of them. I think this is because our category list on our left hand sidebar has so many categories, and that sidebar appears on every last one of our pages even all the way into our products. Can anyone take a look and tell me if this is the reason why and what I could possibly do about this? Thanks in advance! www.Ocelco.com
On-Page Optimization | | Mike.Bean0 -
Too many 301 redirects to home page - is this possible?
If a site has a bunch of 404’s that are basically old URL’s that no longer work and point to pages or documents that don’t exist anymore - Can someone clarify if it’s a problem when fixing a bunch of these 404’s to point them all to the home page? so if there is not really anywhere else that is applicable for the old broken URL, is it really a problem to 301 old pages to the site home page? I have read some different things on this recently on some different sites, so I just wondered what the latest thinking on this was….thanks...
On-Page Optimization | | inhouseninja0 -
Max # of recommended links per page?
I've heard it said that Google may choose to stop following links after the first 100 on a page. The landing/category pages for my site's product catalog have earned quite a respectable PR and positioning in search results, and I'm currently paginating their product listings (about 200 products in a category) so that only a couple dozen products are shown on the first page, with links to "next page" and "previous page" being accomplished via query string (i.e. "?page=3"). An alternative option I have is to link to 100% of the contained products within the category's landing page (which would increase my on-page link count to ~300) and use CSS/Javascript to allow the user to simulate browsing between pages on the client side. My goal is to see as many of my product pages indexed as possible. Is this done better using my current scheme (where Googlebot would have to navigate to, say, Landing Page -> Page 6 -> Deeply Buried Product Page) or in the alternative method above, where all the links are in a single page? Since my landing pages are currently treated pretty well by search engines, would that "trust" cause them to follow more links than might normally be done? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | cadenzajon0 -
Where does link juice flow on a cloaked link?
Hello, I use a wordpress plug in that allows me to display tot he user any link I want from my domain, so it might be like: www.domain.com/gift-card, but the actual link is www.someaffiliatelink/w09fjai;owfoienw <--- and then a bunch of crap after the domain for the affiliate link. It uses the common technique of an iframe to hide the actual url from the user and show the one that I want them to see. What I am wondering is, does link juice in this case flow to my site, or to their site? And also, do you have any comments regarding this type of link cloaking? Thanks. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | BigJohnson0