"Too many on page links" phantom penalty? What about big sites?

[kida12meyer]

So I am consistently over the recommended "100 links" rule on our site's pages because of our extensive navigation and plentiful footer links (somewhere around 300 links per page). I know that there is no official penalty for this but rather that it affects the "link juice" of each link on there. I guess my question is more about how places like Zappos and Amazon get away with this? They have WAY over 100 links per page... in fact I think that Zappos footer is 100+ links alone. This overage doesn't seem to affect their domain rankings and authority so why does SEO moz place so much emphasis on this error?

[RebekahMay]

The 100 links thing is more of a general recommendation than a "rule" .  The answer could be different from site to site.  Back in the day,  this was a limit of 100 links crawled per page because Google put a cap on how much they would crawl in order to save some bandwidth.

In current times, this is more about how much domain authority your site has.  If you have a lot of links, those are all going to be leeching your PR and they will all get less "juice" as the amount that flows over will keep getting divided.

Sites like Amazon and Zappos have a lot of authority and PR, therefore this is not as big of an issue to them.

[Marcus_Miller]

This was a rule from back in the day when Google's advice was not to have more than 100 links per page. The thing is, whilst this exact rule is not really the case now, there is a lot of good reason not to have a link to every page on every page.

If you have this kind of huge navigation

1. is it good for users? Will they really navigate through 300 odd links?
2. do you really want to evenly distribute page rank across all pages in the site and indicate that each page is equally important?

Also, if all links are not getting crawled, then there is a potential for page rank distribution to be messed up with certain pages not getting anything due to the behemoth navigation.

It's important to note though, this has never been a penalty issue, it is really just a bad internal SEO (and possibly usability) issue.

This is an interesting read:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many

Also, you can see Google still recommend that you 'keep the links on a given page to a reasonable amount':
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769#1

Now, only you can determine what a reasonable amount is for your site. If all pages have tons of authority, then great, but if not, you may want to rethink your navigation.

Hope this helps
Marcus

[kida12meyer]

Thanks for the reply. I guess then my question is... why doesn't SEO moz give you a range of links appropriate for your domain authority? So for example if my domain authority is 35 what range of links would be appropriate... if its 65, likewise what amount of links would be considered permissible? The reason i say range is because i know its not a hard fast rule. Its just hard to see thousands of errors glaring at you every day when in fact they may not be affecting your domain authority like they say.

[RebekahMay]

I cannot speak for SEOMoz, but I personally think one of the reasons they don't tell you what a good range to have is because a lot of it comes down to your site structure as well as authority.  Telling people how many they can have based on domain authority, and knowing nothing of site structure, may lead to bad practices.

Like Marcus says above:

"Now, only you can determine what a reasonable amount is for your site. If all pages have tons of authority, then great, but if not, you may want to rethink your navigation. "

[kida12meyer]

I can totally agree with that statement. Perhaps I misspoke. Im not asking for them to set my guidelines but rather just noting that they are pretty certain about drawing that line at 100 with their error reporting as opposed to keeping that line fuzzy like it really is.