Will deleting excess self serving links from old posts damage established ranking

[wianno168]

My SEOmoz report showed many posts with "too many links."

I can easily go back into wordpress and delete self serving links. But is there a downside to this if these posts are already ranked well on google search for the desired key words?

Or will deleting the excess self serving links improve ranking

[AlanMosley]

The same amount of link juice will flow though the links, so redusing the links will mean more will flow thought the links that are left. keep them to 250 or less

[MikeGracia]

In my opinion...

It really depends on the context. Are you worried that the posts you remove the links on will drop rankings, or that the pages/posts they link TO will drop?

What I mean is, are the links from your posts going out to pages that you wish to get to rank? If so, are they ranking?

Or, are you cross-linking, post to post?

As an example, roughly how many links are on each post, and how many (average) words per post?

In general, I don't like to link out too much from posts, as the 'juice' passed by each link will be less, and it can look spammy.

If you pull several outbound internal links from a selection of posts, it may be wise to plan it so that not all the links point to the same pages(s), so that across the board, no single page gets a drastic drop in internal links.

Another possible tactic (taking into account, and agreeing with, what Alan said below), is that you could also pull any links that go out to pages you are not as bothered about, if you have any such outbound links on your posts. Perhaps checking your Analytics reports for the best converting pages will help you decide this (being sure to have first touch attribution installed, of course!).

Without an example though, it is kinda hard to give anything other than generic advice...

[wianno168]

Thank you.  My SEOmoz report flagged one category on my blog during one month which had 130  internal links spread over 15 posts or articles.

Where does the 250 limit apply as I was flagged for having at most 10 per artcile although some were above the fold

[wianno168]

I am concerned that the posts that I link to will drop in ranking. These are internal links to relevant pages within my own site=self serving posts.

Some were above the fold (I was inexperienced when I did this).

My average blog article is 600-700 words.In some that SEOmoz flagged - were a series of 8 posts or articles written in one category over a period of one month which had a total of 130 self serving links

[AlanMosley]

130 links is not too much. Bing will index 250, and google there is no set limit.

[wianno168]

Thank you. Why did the SEOmoz report flag as too many links? I guess they define too many as over 100.

The problem is they define a page as a category that could have 10 or 15 different posts in a month. Should I just ignore the issue?

[AlanMosley]

up untill recently the limit google talked about was 100, but recently Matt Cutts has said that they can handle more then that.

Every time a link passes PageRank, only 85% is passed, they do this so page rank does not pass thought links in eternal loops. but even passing only 85% we never get to 0, there is always 85% of something left. So thee must be a cut off point when the number gets too small to pass. now if you had so many links on a page that the PR was dived up so small that it did not make that cut off point, then the page would pass no PR. So therre is a limit but thet depends on the PR a page has and what the cutt off point is.

Bing has a hard limit of 250
http://thatsit.com.au/seo/reports/violation/the-page-contains-too-many-hyperlinks

[KeriMorgret]

Here's a post from Dr. Pete on SEOmoz about the 100 link warning and the subject in general.

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