On-site links

[DavidPilon]

Hi everybody,

There's a lot of information about getting sitewide backlinks, but so few about on-site optimization.

Is there a maximum of links to put on a page ?

Is there a maximum of link that a page should receive ?

etc ... ?

So, what is the optimal strategy ? And I'm only concerned about on-page and on-site link, not backlinks commming from other sites.

Thanks

[Keszi]

Hi David,

I would avoid having more then 50 links on a page in total because of two factors:

1.) It confuses the the client (just think as you would walk in a park and you get to an intersection where you have 100 ways to go, which path would you choose?)

2.) if we look at the pagerank formula (as we know it since the beginnings) think about how much would you divide the "link juice" (ex. you have a chocolate and you want to split it to a lot of people).

I hope this helped you make a decision.

Gr.,

Istvan

[DavidPilon]

Good, it confirms what I thought.

I was asking to make shure and have the feedback of other SEO as a lot of things changed the last 12 months. But for now, my site has rouglhy 45 pages and I have a total of 110 links in my text (I exclude the call-to-action butons on side of the pages, there's 3-4 of them by page) and the most links I have in a page is 15 (anchor type on text keyword).

[Dr-Pete]

I wrote about this a while back - I think it 98% still applies today:

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

It's really a question of dilution - the more thinly you spread your internal link "juice" (PR, basically), the less each page gets. So, it's often a balancing act. There's rarely one right answer, but I find that less is often more.

I think Istvan's point about users is important, too. It's easy for people to get overloaded with options. I've seen sites with 500+ links that presented them very well, but that's rare. At the same time, those were big brand sites with a lot of inbound links and authority, so they can play by different rules.