Too Many On-Page Links Reported By SEOmoz

[rahulchowdhury]

Hi,

I recently did run a crawl report for my blog dapazze.com, and found that SEOmoz is reporting many pages on my blog having more than 100 internal links.

I opened OSE, and made a search for one of my pages which was reported to contain more than 100 links. And I found it to contain 464 internal links.

Here is the link: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?page=1&site=dapazze.com%2F2012%2F10%2Fwin-a-commentluv-premium-single-site-and-multi-site-license-worth-about-154-giveaway-of-october%2F&sort=page_authority&filter=&source=internal&target=page&group=0

Please have a look at it. I have chosen - Show "All" links from "only internal" pages to "this page" option in OSE, which reports me this.

I see almost every page in my blog linking to every page. This is not the problem for me. I have also tried to make a search for some popular bloggers, like ProBlogger.net, ShoutMeLoud.com, HellBoundBloggers.com, etc, and all of them have the same problem.

Should I be worrying about this problem? What is the problem actually?

[donford]

Rahul the links do count as internal links if they are on the page. It matters not how they are being generated. Once again the 100 is just a general rule, if there is user benefits for having over 100 then I would say you have nothing to worry about.

The amount of links on your site is not burdening the user so I doubt those are factors causing you any issues.

[rahulchowdhury]

Ok. Thanks for making me understand the problem.

But will it hurt, if all these sidebar, footer, and  navigation links get counted as internal links? I only make about 5 internal links from the body of the post, but all these other links are making it to 100+.

Will these create any problem for me?

[rahulchowdhury]

The article is excellent. It made my conception very very clear. Thank you.

[KeriMorgret]

Here's a good post Dr. Pete wrote on the subject about too many links that may help.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many

[donford]

HI Rahul,

The links you are talking about from opensiteexplorer and both internal links and other domains linking to you.

Your internal links show as 261 using the On-Page Report

The other 180'ish links are other domains linking to you which is good.

Looking at the page...http://dapazze.com/2012/10/win-a-commentluv-premium-single-site-and-multi-site-license-worth-about-154-giveaway-of-october/  it is taking into account all the anchor links, all the navigational links, footer links, comment links ect.. easily 200+.

Hope that helps,

Don

[rahulchowdhury]

Hi, Thanks a lot for making me understand the problem. But still there is a confusion left with me. Please have a look at the link I gave you with. I see that almost all pages in my blog are getting linked from that particular page, according to SEOmoz. But in reality, my post contains only a few internal links, not even 10 I guess. But how can it reach upto 464 links, while I am not physically linking to those pages, nor do I see any link currently present in that page. You can also check yourself if you want to confirm. Then how does SEOmoz show me about 464 links? Nt only this page, other pages also have similar stats. And not only my blog, I have noticed this same thing for many popular blogs like ProBlogger, Hongkiat.com, etc. Then how come they are also doing the same mistake? Is it a mistake from my/our side, or is it a mistake SEOmoz crawler has, and it is reporting internal links wrongly?

[donford]

Hi Rahul,

In regards to on page links...

Like most things SEOMoz informs you about you should take it as a very important suggestion, but not necessarily the absolute rule.

Here is a direct quote from Matt Cutts
REF: MattCutts.com

"But in some cases, it might make sense to have more than a hundred links. Does Google automatically consider a page spam if your page has over 100 links? No, not at all. The “100 links” recommendation is in the “Design and content” guidelines section, and it’s the Quality guidelines that contain the things that we consider webspam (stuff like hidden text, doorway pages, installing malware, etc.). Can pages with over 100 links be spammy? Sure, especially if those links are hidden or keyword-stuffed. But pages with lots of links are not automatically considered spammy by Google."

That being said, you should also note by having that many links, you are effectively diluting the link juice each page passes on to next to nothing. Each link passes a percentage of the "link juice" if you have 100 links then each link is passing about 1% juice when you get into 400+ you are effectively passing nothing to along to any sub pages. This can be really problematic if lets say you have a very poor performing article or post on your site if you are linking to it from every other page you are saying hey this is a great page, but in reality the search engines thinks it isn't, you just wasted all that juice that could have been benefiting your higher quality pages.