Excessive internal links. Should I remove the footer links?

[goforgreen]

Hi guys,

I have an ecommerce site selling eco-friendly items online. I ran some on-page optimisation reports from SEOMoz PRO and discovered that I have at least 120 internal links per page.

32 of these are in the footer, designed in part to aid user navigation but perhaps also to have a positive impact on SERPs and SEO in general for the ecommerce site.

Will removing these links be beneficial to my search engine rankings, as I will have less than 100 internal links per page?

Or is it a major change which may be dangerous for my site rankings?

Please help as I'm not sure about this! I've attached an image of the footer links below. I won't be removing the Facebook/Twitter links, just the 3 columns on the left.

Thank you,

Pravin

MAvLe.jpg

[Bryan_Loconto]

It's debatable these internal links seem like they are here for the user, I would check to see if these buttons get any clicks, if they dont you might not need them. Here's a recent WBF that should help: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/smarter-internal-linking-whiteboard-friday

[BlueLinkERP]

Google has declared war against the practice of excessive internal linking - which is why SEOmoz warns you about these excessive links within its tools.

Is it going to get you de-indexed? Maybe not. But as Google comes down harder on these practices it could certainly affect your ranking.

Having links for navigation is recommended, but taking up 1/3 of the page with footer links is obviously not benefiting the end user.

[donford]

Hi Pravin,

That is a good question many people have.

Like most things SEOMoz informs you about you should take it as a very important suggestion, but not necessarily the absolute rule.

Here is a direct quote from Matt Cutts
REF: MattCutts.com

"But in some cases, it might make sense to have more than a hundred links. Does Google automatically consider a page spam if your page has over 100 links? No, not at all. The “100 links” recommendation is in the “Design and content” guidelines section, and it’s the Quality guidelines that contain the things that we consider webspam (stuff like hidden text, doorway pages, installing malware, etc.). Can pages with over 100 links be spammy? Sure, especially if those links are hidden or keyword-stuffed. But pages with lots of links are not automatically considered spammy by Google."

In my 8 years of building e-commerce website I would say more then 100 links is actually the norm. My personal rule of thumb for e-commerce sites is to keep it around 200 in special cases where have more links is user beneficial I will allow for it. Just remember if you make a kick butt home page and get a high pagerank for it 5+ then you put 200+ links on it, you have diluted the value of each link to almost nothing, so design accordingly.

[gcdtechnologies]

Hi Pravin, I wouldn't consider 120 to be overly excessive for an ecommerce site. However there's a danger that the footer links could be perceived as spammy (especially if the anchor text is keyword stuffed). I agree with Bryan - check to see if the links are getting clicks, and if they're not, streamline or cut them. Good luck!