'Too many links' on our pages.

[Ashley-Jacada]

This figure includes links that sit within our navigational menus. Is there a way to block this somehow so that Google and Moz do not read them as 'internal links'?

Thanks in advance.

[donford]

HI Ashley,

It has been awhile since I have seen this question. Figured I'd jump in on this one.

In the early years of crawlers it was a pretty good rule of thumb to limit internal linking to 100 links, mostly because the crawler's didn't have the resources to crawl a ton of links. A lot has changed since this rule was introduced. Spiders have gotten smarter and are able to handle way more data than what they could back in the day.

But the spiders ability to deal with content should not be the only reason you evaluate how many links you should put on a page. The rule of a 100is still a good rule when you start thinking about things like how link juice is passed and what you "Really" want the search engines to know about. Dr. Pete wrote a blog post here on Moz about this, you can read here.
 Once you get to the 100 link range the search engines don't really place much value on any of your links. Conversely if you limit your linking to 25 or so, the search engine is able to correlate X page to Y content very highly.

To address the question how can you limit the amount of links Google Or Moz sees, well the best way is to reduce the way your pages are internally linked. If you have a super large navigation in your header or footer it may make sense to change the way the navigation is built. But, if you REALLY feel that having all those links in the navigation is helpful to your viewers then you can use things like Ajax calls to load links on hover or click. Most crawlers won't be able to load action scripts but they are getting smarter.

In summary the rule of 100 is really an old rule but still important just not in the way it was originally introduced. Today you probably can expect most cralwers to do 150-300 links before giving up. If you have a high page and domain authority you may find just ignoring the warning is the best course of action. However, if you're still working to get those rankings up it may likely be worth the time to create a better navigation that logically points to the most important section from each page.

I hope this helps,

Don

[authority-networks]

You can't tell Google not to include navigation links as internal links, as they are internal links. We just had this happen to a client of ours who had 100 links just in his navigation alone. We were able to reduce those links to 25 and we have already seen an improvement. You'd be surprised how many links you don't "need" in your navigation.

[Ashley-Jacada]

Thanks for the responses! Very helpful advice.