How can I reduce my warnings for excesive links on our site?

[guycochran]

Our campaign overview shows well over 100 warnings that could be hurting our google ranking based on excessive links on pages. Each page listed, however, is simply due to listing the brands we carry, and linking to the products.

Is there a way to do this without hurting our ranking? A better way than linking, perhaps?

Thanks in advance!

[TroyCarlson]

Do you mean that you have pages that list all the brands in one spot?  Could you break those links into larger categories?  That might help them to be more organized, more easily scanned and that would also be a better user experience, I imagine.

[guycochran]

Yes, the page is this one: http://www.dvestore.com/brands/

We do have the brands somewhat broken out over the main site, but as most people do in our field, we have one page where you can look at all brands, each picture linking to the products we carry by them.

[TroyCarlson]

My initial thought is that having both the logos AND the tag cloud might be overkill and part of the problem.  It's basically the same information twice.

The other thing is...maybe you don't worry about this page ranking?  I mean...sure, you'll see warnings about this page, but maybe set this page to "no-index" and tune the rest of your site.  This page isn't going to be the one to pull in organic search results, so I would think it can just be ignored.  Focus on pages that will actually return results.

[guycochran]

Thanks,

That's very possible. Managing SEO like this is new to us, so I just figured I'd try and fix everything. If those particular warnings aren't too critical, then that's good to know, and we can move on.

Thanks again!

[TroyCarlson]

My pleasure.  To be honest, I'm still fairly new to it myself, so I'd be curious if anyone else had a different opinion.  I just know that in the past, I've just ignored some pages that don't have anything on them that will necessarily bring home the bacon.  Sometimes, a page that will be useful for a user will just look like a list of brands to a search engine, so...add it to the list of disallow'd pages in our robots.txt and let it go, imo.

[TheSEODR]

Excessive links don't necessarily hurt your ranking if they are pointing to relevant, unique pages and enhance the user experience.

But if you want to cut down the number of links on the page, you can remove the anchor text link below each logo. Both the image link and text link are pointing to the same page. You will be able to slice the number of links on page in half.

[rrolfe]

As an alternative to Derek's suggestion..  Use the same link for the logo and the text.  Currently you are wrapping the img tag in one anchor and then the brand name in another. Try putting them both inside the same anchor with the
in between them.

This eliminates 1 of the links from each brand.  Then perhaps remove that tag cloud as Troy suggested. Honestly I didn't even see the tag cloud there until Troy mentioned it in his answer.

[Dr-Pete]

I'd tend to agree with Troy (and I'm thumbing up his replies). This isn't your home-page or sitewide navigation - having too many links on just this one page probably isn't worth worrying about too much. You could nofollow the tag links - they are redundant. Realistically, though, since they link to the same URLs, Google probably already ignores those links (even though we count them twice).

You could argue that maybe the page isn't that helpful for users and prune it down somehow, but purely from an SEO standpoint, it's not a big deal. The main issue with too many links is one of dilution. I wrote about it more here:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many

[guycochran]

Thanks much, everyone. Relatively new to learning SEO, I saw the warnings that came up for it and immediately grew concerned. I believe that for now, I'm going to leave them as is, and worry about the stronger warnings and errors first, then perhaps visit this subject again with a web designer who might have some options on how to cut down the links but still make this a useful page.

Again, thanks!