Too Many Page Links

[NicheGuy]

I have 8 niche websites for golf clubs. This was done to carve out tight niches for specific types of clubs then only broadens each club by type - i.e. better player, game improvement, max game improvement.

So far, for fairly young sites, <1 year, they are doing fairly well as I build content.

Running campaigns has alerted me to one problem - too many on-page links. And because I use Wordpress those links are on each page in the right sidebar and lead to the other sites. Even though visitors arrive via organic search in most cases they tend to eventually exit to one of the other sites or they click on a product (Ebay) and venture off to hopefully make a purchase.

Ex: Drivers site will have a picture link for each of the other 7 sites.

Question: If I have one stie (like a splash page) used as one link to that page listing all the sites with a brief explanation of each site will this cause visitors to bounce off because they will have one click, than the list and other clicks depending on what other club/site they would like to go to. The links all open in new windows.

This would cut down on the number of links per page of each site but will it cause too much work for visitors and cause them to leave?

[Houses]

Where are you getting the impression you have too many links?

Over 100 is too many. The numbers you mention aren't that high.

[AndrewAtMGXCopy]

@donb - how many links do your tools indicate that you have?

[NicheGuy]

@House - I didn't mention any link numbers so how could you know they're too high?

@Andrew - Problem solved, I went to work eliminating some duplicate links in the footer and sidebar. The number was over 100 (114-134 depending on the site).

It seems the latest report didn't show "too many on-page links" during the last crawl since the apparent number went under 100.

Since the cross-referencing links to my other sites in each sidebar don't seem to be a factor any long I'm leaving them.

[Houses]

@Don - I mentioned that you didn't say how many links you had but you did say you had a problem of too many on-page links.

There wasn't much detail about the links, hence the question about where you were getting the data from and Andrew's question too.

Perhaps should have left off the "the numbers you mention aren't that high"  - it was reference to the numbers of websites you mentioned and the thought that there wouldn't be that many links from just one page to your other sites.