'Too many on-page links': doesn't add up...

[RomanCat]

Hi All,

I'm fairly new to the site, have had a full site crawl and am somewhat confused by a large number of pages (82) reported as showing 'too many on page links'.

Mine is a new e-commerce site selling a project management methodology.  I have about 80 pages which describe individual templates and contain internal links to additional, related content on the site.

The crawl warnings define too many on page links as roughly 100 "on any given page" yet almost none of the pages flagged contain more than  20-30 on links.

Any thoughts and ideas about (a) the degree to which this will aeffect my ranking in practice and (b) how to resolve it gratefully received!

Thanks in advance,

Felix

[AdamThompson]

Hi Felix,

Having more than 100 links on a page is usually not a problem, as long as you're not doing anything shady (it doesn't sound like you are). See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6g5hoBYlf0

Keep in mind that PageRank flows by being divided among each link on the page - so having more links means less PageRank flows to each one.

If you can provide one of the URLs, I can provide more detailed input.

~Adam

[RomanCat]

Hi Adam,

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

Just viewed the google video on the subject.  On the one hand this is great: google seem to have said clearly that the <100 links rule is an old rule and no longer very relevant.  On the hand this invoke confidence in SEOMoz: if it's been noted as far back as February 2011 (date of the video) that this link rule no longer carries much if any weight then why are SEOMoz flagging it up for me as a yellow issue in Febraury 2013?

In addition to that the number of on-page links picked up the SEOMoz crawl do not add up: one page with 9 internal links / 16 if you include the navigation links are showing up as having 116 links on the same page... it may not be relevant if the <100 links issue isn't relevant but it's causing concern about the relevance and accuracy of the blog.

Point about outgoing PR being diluted by the number of links noted.

Anyway: thanks again, i've also sent you an example link via pm.

All the best,

Felix

[EricPratum30]

Most of the time, the majority of on-page links come from header, sidebar, and footer navigation. Do you have About in the header with a hover function that displays 5 more links (Contact, History, etc)? There's a good chance that's being counted as 6 links just as an example.

Because of things like rational surfer, you generally don't need to worry about this as far as pagerank and all of that goes. I would consider though what the value of all of your on-page links to your users are. Use a clicktracking service to see which links are getting used and which aren't and then a/b/n test removing or moving some.