Too many links

[reallyitsme]

Hello,

sorry question 2! I run the report it says we have 120 links roughly per page. I know this is bad however I have question about an oscommerce site. I identified some links that can be deleted for example Product picture is a link then the title and then  its says details (so I can delete the details and that should save about 15 links) Now I really can only delete the breadcrumb for example car>>ford>>spareparts>>engine

If I delete the breadcrumb I would lose four links would you say thats a good idea? or leave the breadcrumb due to the seo benefits.

Many thanks for your help. Sonja

[fourthdimensioninc]

leave the breadcrumbs, set canonical urls, and remove any duplicate links. Breadcrumbs provide easy navigation for users, and are great anchor text links. I would maybe try to limit the numbers of products per page, and do some pagination with canonical urls?

hope that helps.

[gfiorelli1]

Stop before you are deleting too many things.

Consider this: deleting photos (because of their link) are you making the product pages more interesting?... I doubt it.

And don't delete the breadcrumb, as it is a great on page optimization "tool", because helps the crawlers understanding where they are in the links architecture of the site. And because they are also a great usability help for the users.

Don't worry overly too much if you have more than 100 links per page (and you have 120, which is not a huge surplus)... as Google along these months have repeatedly affirmed that it has no problem with pages with many links inside.

Yes, too many links can dilute the link juice a page is passing to the others, but it that page is a product one, don't worry.

Eventually try to optimize the home page, category and subcategory pages, in order to have a good hierarchy. For instance, the home page linking just to the product categories (and eventually to the most important products); the categories pages linking to their subcategories, and this ones to the other subcategories of the same categories it is a part of and to its sub-subcategories, if they exists.

But do not delete links that are useful like photos or breadcrumb.

[reallyitsme]

Hi Guys,

many thanks for answering so quickly. Gianluca what you say make absolute sense to me I thought it was strange that 120 links is a real problem but I think I did not make it clear enough of what I want to do  - I would never want to delete the pictures. Imagine a shopping site on our site there is a product picture a customer can click on that to get to the product - then there is the the title underneath..that is also clickable....and then it says details also a link to the product so I'm thinking of removing the detail link and leaving the rest - Hope that makes sense

Dru many thanks for your response - I though you were right about the breadcrumb but to be honest I really dont understand the canonical url issue and I read that it should not be used too much. I have another question open about this issue so I really dont want to add more. But thanks anyway for taking time to reply.

kind regards

Sonja