Too Many On Page Links, rel="nofollow" and rel="external"

[Tinhat]

Hi,

Though similar to other questions on here I haven't found any other examples of sites in the same position as mine.

It's an e-commerce site for mobile phones that has product pages for each phone we sell. Each tariff that is available on each phone links through to the checkout/transfer page on the respective mobile phone network. Therefore when the networks offer 62 different tariffs that are available on a single phone that means we automatically start with 62 on page links that helps to quickly tip us over the 100 link threshold.

Currently, we mark these up as rel="external" but I'm wondering if there isn't a better way to help the situation and prevent us being penalised for having too many links on page so:

1. Can/should we mark these up as rel="nofollow" instead of, or as well as, rel="external"?
2. Is it inherently a problem from a technical SEO point of view?
3. Does anyone have any similar experiences or examples that might help myself or others?

As always, any help or advice would be much appreciated

[irvingw]

you can have over 100 links on a page now. that was an old rule when Google had limited bandwidth and the crawler would abandon a page acter following a certain number of links. now google sucks up whatever there is on a page.

do what makes most sense for user navigation. too many links can be overkill or might fit perfectly into your model.

Keep in mind you are really splitting up your PR by having so many links and pushing pr to all pages instead of the main ones.

[Tinhat]

I get what you're saying. That's the general SEO best practice that I'm aware of. I was just looking for something a bit deeper than general kind of guidance.

Our user navigation isn't ideal (sadly there's not much as SEO I can do about it) but with the right filters and options it works ok. We can't really remove the links because they are the tariff options as they come through from the networks themselves. We do however show a tailored few when people land on the page with the option to see all deals.

With that in mind I'm essentially asking is there a better way to markup these links than with rel="external"? They are external links after all but we don't want to risk having this many links on the page cause negative side effects.

The user experience is generally fine and the number of links is fixed. I wonder if we can't do better with what we currently have by improving our PR distribution somehow.

Here is an example of a product page:

http://www.o2-deals.co.uk/o2-samsung-galaxy-ace-2.html

[Dr-Pete]

Since these are really external links, it's a bit different calculus, especially since they're deeper on the site. "Nofollow" won't really help from a link juice perspective (it still gets burnt), although it would disavow those links, in a sense.

How is the target page redirecting to the outside site? I'm having a hard time telling with header checkers. That could impact the SEO implications quite a bit. This almost seems like an affiliate link sort of scenario, so it's more a matter of how Google sees the hundreds of links between these two sites.

They're definitely burning up some internal link equity, but at this level of the site (search results to product pages), that's not as big of an issue as if this were the home-page or a major category page, etc.

[The_Tela]

I agree with Dr. Pete that this seems like the same sort of challenge that affiliate links have, even if this isn't a standard affiliate program link. It sounds to me like there might be a UI/UX solution that could address this issue.

Could you add an intersticial URL / step after the user selects the phone they want that contains the tariff codes? Could you use a selector on the page to let the user select and generate the link with the tariff code dynamically, thus having one on-page URL conserving link juice? Just a couple of ideas, but it seems like the real issue is conserving link juice, and it's not necessary to keep the on-page links under the 100 link limit.

[Tinhat]

Thanks Dr Pete.

The target page takes the customer to a dynamic 'transfer' page with affiliate tracking information that ensures the sale gets attributed to us. We have to do this because we don't have our own cart/checkout system. It's not an affiliate link swapping program or anything dubious - we don't actually get linked back to by the networks. I'd have thought Google was used to handling official affiliate programs.

I can totally see why it would look bad to Google by having this many external affiliate links on page but there is little we can do about the number of deals that the network offers. Our system of showing a restricted number of deals upon landing with the option to see 10 more at a time helps deal with UX issues.

It's reassuring to note that it is less of an issue because it is a deeper page than the home page.

Seeing as we are official affiliates to the major networks can you recommend any practices or techniques to mitigate the impact of large numbers of affiliate links to their sites?

[Tinhat]

Thanks Tela.

I think you might be on to something here. You're right that the worry is looking needlessly spammy by having too many affiliate links on page and also about conserving link juice.

It's something I'll have to speak to our development team about because generating the tariff code dynamically might take a fair bit of work. It's definitely an idea I think we should investigate.

Regarding the interstitial URL/step after the user select the phone they want - there is already a 'transfer page' that holds them for a few seconds before taking them to the network's basket/checkout. I fear that adding yet another step before that would have a negative impact on the customer journey as we already see people dropping out in the post-transfer stage before completing the sale.

Cheers for the help.

[Dr-Pete]

How is your transfer page working, technically - it seems to be resolving as a straight 200 for me. Those transfer pages are usually where affiliates start to get creative (they might 302, for example).