What does it mean that "too many links" show up in my report - but I'm not seeing them?

[ScottImageWorks]

I've noticed that on the crawl report for my site, www.imageworkscreative.com, "too many links" is showing up as a chronic problem.

Reviewing the pages cited as having this issue, I don't see more than 100 links.  I've read that sometimes, websites are unintentionally cloaking their links, and I am concerned that this is what might be happening on my site.

Some example pages from my crawl report are:

http://www.imageworkscreative.com/blog/, http://www.imageworkscreative.com/blog/10-steps-seo-and-sem-success/index.html, and http://www.imageworkscreative.com/blog/business-objectives-vs-user-experience/index.html.

Am I having a cloaking issue or is something else going on here?  Any insight is appreciated!

[Linda-Vassily]

If you look at your source, there are a lot of @import and javascript urls; perhaps this is what is being picked up.

[KempRugeLawGroup]

I agree with Linda. It looks like you only 60 or so hyperlinks, so you should be okay there. But, I think it was something like 120 or so @imports.

[Kara.Wallace]

Hi Jess,

Using Screaming Frog, it looks like your /blog page actually has 131 links. If you add up your footer (30), plus links to your homepage (6), plus pagination (9), plus Link Building and Content article (5), and your Alex Bogusky Video article (6) - you already have 50+ and that is not including top and side navigation, as well as the rest of the articles on your page.

Matt Cutts sums things up really well in this article saying:

"...Google will index more than 100K of a page, but there’s still a good reason to recommend keeping to under a hundred links or so: the user experience. If you’re showing well over 100 links per page, you could be overwhelming your users and giving them a bad experience. A page might look good to you until you put on your “user hat” and see what it looks like to a new visitor.

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.

So how might Google treat pages with well over a hundred links? If you end up with hundreds of links on a page, Google might choose not to follow or to index all those links. At any rate, you’re dividing the PageRank of that page between hundreds of links, so each link is only going to pass along a minuscule amount of PageRank anyway. Users often dislike link-heavy pages too, so before you go overboard putting a ton of links on a page, ask yourself what the purpose of the page is and whether it works well for the user experience."

Hope this helps.

Mike

[jesse-landry]

Yeah Mike is right on as usual here.

I just want to point out a quick way to find out how many actual links are sitting on any given page (keep in mind this won't be exact but it'll be close.)

USING CHROME:

1. Right click the page and select "View Source"
2. Hit CTRL+F
3. Type in<a href <="" span=""></a>
   <a href <="" span=""></a>

<a href <="" span="">Boom. You'll have yourself a number of results and that's how many links you have, cloaked or not cloaked, give or take.

This is easier to look at I feel like and a fun little (maybe obvious, sorry if so) tip.

Good luck!</a>

[CleverPhD]

If you read in the on page optimization tool, it is inconsistent with the crawl tool.

"Avoid Excessive Internal Links

Employing an excessive quantity of internal-pointing links may not directly harm the value of a page, but it can influence the quantity of link juice sent through those links and dilute it's ability to help get link targets crawled, indexed and ranked.

Recommendation: Scale down the number of internal links to fewer than 100 (preferrably), and, at a minimum, fewer than 300"

That said the 100 links rule is a "Warning" (Yellow) and not a Error (Red).  It is still confusing.

Here is also a Matt Cutts video that refutes the 100 links

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6g5hoBYlf0

Seems like Moz needs to update its messaging around this item.

[ScottImageWorks]

Thanks, everyone!  I appreciate the help!