Do image "lightbox" photo gallery links on a page count as links and dilute PageRank?

[TomNYC]

Hi everyone,

On my site I have about 1,000 hotel listing pages, each which uses a lightbox photo gallery that displays 10-50 photos when you click on it.

In the code, these photos are each surrounded with an "a href", as they rotate when you click on them. Going through my Moz analytics I see that these photos are being counted by Moz as internal links (they point to an image on the site), and Moz suggests that I reduce the number of links on these pages.

I also just watched Matt Cutt's new video where he says to disregard the old "100 links max on a page" rule, yet also states that each link does divide your PageRank. Do you think that this applies to links in an image gallery? We could just switch to another viewer that doesn't use "a href" if we think this is really an issue.

Is it worth the bother? Thanks.

[BlueprintMarketing]

if you have 1000 links in one website page you can deter Google bot crawling your site and unless it has a high page rank. I have seen the same video that you're discussing about when Matt Cutts says that 3 years ago that was a big deal however no longer is Google shackled to that.

Check your Google Webmaster tools account to see how often your site is crawled.

Use screaming frog spider SEO it is a free tool you can find by googling the name and it will give you a ton of information on up to 500 pages for free.

I would worry about the way the site is coded if you need to put 1000 links in one page.

I still agree with Moz if you go over 300 it's not good.

Links to photographs are not considered external or outbound links meaning they do not link to Twitter or another website other than your own. So you will not lose page rank that way. I would put my trust in what is said by Moz it is based on a lot of testing in the real world so you can rest assured that this is not a guess or somebody's opinion.

All the best,

Thomas

[TomNYC]

Hi Thomas,

Thanks for your answer. Perhaps I haven't been very clear -- we don't have 1,000 links on one page. We have 1,000 pages, each with a photo gallery that has about 50 or so photos. Each of these galleries uses "href" in the code to pull up the next image. However, Moz is counting each of these images as a link, and telling me that I should cut back on the number of links on that page. (Counting these "links" in the image gallery, most of these pages have about 100-150 links on them.)

My question is whether or not those images really are diluting page rank that is being passed on to other important pages on the site, and if we should switch our photo gallery widget to something that doesn't use "href" to show each individual image.

Many thanks.

[BlueprintMarketing]

That makes complete sense when you put it through the campaign it stated to you that there were some issues with how many internal links you currently have.

I tend to agree with what is said in the tool about having over 300 links per page.

I know there our people that can set up a script for your gallery that could make that change if you want.

Check out GregReindel.com  I think you're pretty safe with only 150 links however you really don't want to push it much over that.

Sincerely,

Thomas

[BlueprintMarketing]

Here is the best answer to your question.

Dr. Pete did a great job rating this article.

http://moz.com/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many

More info here

http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/understanding-site-architecture-with-xenu-and-excel/

http://www.searchenginesbook.com/absolutelinks.html

Thomas