Pages with excessive number of links

[Bee159]

Hi all, I work for a retailer and I've crawled our website with RankTracker for optimization suggestions.

The main suggestion is "Pages with excessive number of links: 4178"

The page with the largest amount of links has 634 links (627 internal, 7 external), the lowest 382 links (375 internal, 7 external).

However, when I view the source on any one of the example pages, it becomes obvious that the site's main navigation header contains 358 links, so every new page starts with 358 links before any content.

Our rivals and much larger sites like argos.co.uk appear to have just as many links in their main navigation menu.

So my questions are:

1. Will these excessive links really be causing us a problem or is it just 'good practice' to have fewer links
2. Can I use 'no follow' to stop Google etc from counting the 358 main navigation links
3. Is have 4000+ pages of your website all dumbly pointing to other pages a help or hindrance?
4. Can we 'minify' this code so it's cached on first load and therefore loads faster?

Thank you.

[ClaytonJ]

Pre 2013 it was bad practice to have in excess of 100 links per page, google technical guideline.  Many SEO tools still use it as a warning bell. However Matt Cutts from google - I recall a few years ago - came out and categorically said it is NOT bad practice.  Have as many links as you like as long as it is natural and helps the customer.

What Matt did say is if it appears like spam, them google will penalize you accordingly. Here we go just found the video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHG6BkmzDEM

So to be clear - if the links are needed and help the customer - I would not concern myself.  Watch the video, nothing better than going straight to the source.

Hope that assists

[netzkern_AG]

There has even been a Google Webmaster Guidelines Update in February 2016 which states

"Limit the number of links on a page to a reasonable number (a few thousand at most)."  (Source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en)

So I really would not bother too much, especially not in a navigation - it often makes lots of sense to have lots of links there. (For example I have several alphabetical selections available on hover from main categories. It would not make sense to remove them just to have fewer links.)

More links are of course not always better - consider what the user is likely to expect/need in navigation etc. Of course, more links mean that the relative importance of each link decreases; but google is able to identify navigation and repeating elements that appear on every page. I'd assume that they treat them different to main-content links. Because, well, they feel a lot different.

Regards

Nico