'Too many links' on our pages.
-
This figure includes links that sit within our navigational menus. Is there a way to block this somehow so that Google and Moz do not read them as 'internal links'?
Thanks in advance.
-
Thanks for the responses! Very helpful advice.
-
You can't tell Google not to include navigation links as internal links, as they are internal links. We just had this happen to a client of ours who had 100 links just in his navigation alone. We were able to reduce those links to 25 and we have already seen an improvement. You'd be surprised how many links you don't "need" in your navigation.
-
HI Ashley,
It has been awhile since I have seen this question. Figured I'd jump in on this one.
In the early years of crawlers it was a pretty good rule of thumb to limit internal linking to 100 links, mostly because the crawler's didn't have the resources to crawl a ton of links. A lot has changed since this rule was introduced. Spiders have gotten smarter and are able to handle way more data than what they could back in the day.
But the spiders ability to deal with content should not be the only reason you evaluate how many links you should put on a page. The rule of a 100is still a good rule when you start thinking about things like how link juice is passed and what you "Really" want the search engines to know about. Dr. Pete wrote a blog post here on Moz about this, you can read here.
Once you get to the 100 link range the search engines don't really place much value on any of your links. Conversely if you limit your linking to 25 or so, the search engine is able to correlate X page to Y content very highly.To address the question how can you limit the amount of links Google Or Moz sees, well the best way is to reduce the way your pages are internally linked. If you have a super large navigation in your header or footer it may make sense to change the way the navigation is built. But, if you REALLY feel that having all those links in the navigation is helpful to your viewers then you can use things like Ajax calls to load links on hover or click. Most crawlers won't be able to load action scripts but they are getting smarter.
In summary the rule of 100 is really an old rule but still important just not in the way it was originally introduced. Today you probably can expect most cralwers to do 150-300 links before giving up. If you have a high page and domain authority you may find just ignoring the warning is the best course of action. However, if you're still working to get those rankings up it may likely be worth the time to create a better navigation that logically points to the most important section from each page.
I hope this helps,
Don
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
-
So many spam links that I haven't created are reflected in my domain
Around 500+ spam links got reflected in my domain. I actually haven't created them. Also, the links are not opening. These links affected my spam score. How can I remove them and reduce my spam score?
Link Building | | OrangeDigital160 -
Too Many links in a Ecommerce website
Hello, I am running a website, which is a kind of e-commerce website. We are providing doctors appointments and online consultations in Pakistan. I am checking my page's SEO using moz tool, it shows me too many links on the page. My question is how many links should we have on a single page?. As on my website every single doctor has a link to his profile, I am using paginations plus i have added internal links to other pages which is related to same specialist doctors. looking for the answer to this question
Link Building | | MuhammadNoman-Imam0 -
Starting a new site's link campaign... how to approach it?
Over the last few years I have been building content in my niche that I believe rivals some of the best content out there and deserves some attention. Although I have a plan to produce alot more content which I believe will take the quality and quantity of my content into a position among the top 5 or top 10 sites in my niche in the next 1-2 years, I decided that making that massive investment in content production irrespective of a consistent marketing plan is a recipe for failure because I need the positive feedback loop from site visitors to begin now, not in 2 years. Right now I'm in a position where I'm producing content that I think is better than alot of what's out there, and it's just not ranking the way I believe it should. I think I need to do a legitimate link building campaign to establish the website a little more firmly and put it on more level ground with some of its competitors. In Majestic SEO's "fresh index", most of my site's immediate competition have no more than 500 new domains in their links, though the biggest one has some 2,000. How can any link building effort I might take on possibly compare to links of this scale? Is there some "rule of thumb" for how many quality links I should aim for to get on square ground with some of the competitors on the lowest rungs? And if I try to build that many links at once, do I risk sending signals of untrustworthiness? (Assume I'm not going to be looking for any shoddy links, and in general will aim to follow Google guidelines.)
Link Building | | guitarsites0 -
If i get link pointing to a specific page , will that link add up to the count of linking root domains too ?
If I create a fresh link pointing to specific page on my site, apart from adding a number to "page linking root domains" does it also add up to root domain linking ?
Link Building | | Techbate1 -
Links aren't showing up in SEOMOZ resports
Hi, I've been building links to my client's website for the past 3 weeks. I know that there are several sites that link to my client's website now but SEOMOZ's link analyses says there aren't any sites linking to my client's website. Anybody know what's up with that? Sincerely, Rex
Link Building | | Rex0 -
Are Directory Links a Good Source of Branded Links?
I am trying to increase the number of branded links for a few of my sites since the links are too heavily weighted on anchor text. If so, would you recommend a service like Directory Maximizer?
Link Building | | rise10 -
Is it worth it to link to sites that link to you in guest posts?
Suppose you published a guest post on a quality site and you link to a previous guest post you have written for another site (which links to you). In theory you could send link juice to the page that links to you for a second order effect. Has anyone seen results from this tactic?
Link Building | | ProjectLabs0 -
How often does Google crawls old pages, is it worth to get links from them ?
Let's say there's a blog post in my industry niche that's 2 years old. Is it worth to get a link from that blog post ? How do I know Google will actually re-crawl that page, and how long can that process take ?
Link Building | | pqdbr0