How to reduce the no. of links on a page without removing them

[IndiaInternet10]

This post is deleted!

[JHSpecialty]

We run e commerce sites. What I was told on the too many link issue was as long as the links do not appear "spammy" it won't hurt.

[UnderRugSwept]

Don't forget that SEOmoz shows the too many links thing as a warning rather than an error. If you need them there, that's fine. The focus should always be on the user first. Having too many links isn't necessarily going to hurt you; it's just been speculated that Google only crawls the first 50-100.

[NakulGoyal]

Santosh

From an indexing issue, it's not a problem. It's just a warning...as JH and Marisa said.

However, I'd look into the usability. Do people use the links to set the appointments ? Does it hurt the "conversion" rate if you were to have the option of Book online, with available time slots visible, just not hyperlinked and then when they get to the following page, a drop down with the available time-slots ?

If it's doable and makes sense, maybe A/B test it.

There's no other way for the links to be on the page but not be visible to the bots

[donford]

Hi Santosh,

As others have mentioned the "To Many Links" should serve as a notice, rather then an out right problem.

It is quite common for many sites to have more then 100 links per page, most notable directories, and e-commerce sites.

Please read this post by Google's Matt Cutts: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-many-links-per-page/
Here is a chart showing the relative links on the top 98 websites: http://www.nickbilton.com/98/

That said, the main way to cut down links per page is to minimize your links in footer / headers / navigation and use Pagination to deal with pages that by nature will generate a lot of links.

Hope this was helpful

[mike-ebert]

Are search engines crawling links generated by JavaScript? If not, he could generate the appointment links using JavaScript and dramatically reduce the number of search-engine-visible links on the page. Since those links are primarily functional in nature and not leading to unique content, I can't see any harm in making the links uncrawlable. It's probably not necessary (I do understand what everyone else has said), but an interesting thought to discuss nonetheless.

[IndiaInternet10]

The customer insists on the way the website links are there so we can't remove the links.

Even though we have made the time-slots link to "no-follow" still seomoz counts those link and shows them as warning. But as "Donford" said, its not much of an issue so we should concentrate on other aspects rather than getting overwhelmed by this.

Thank you all

[CHADHARRIS]

I came across this not sure if you ever solved it- Jquery is how you reduce the links without removing them.