On page link question, creating an additional 'county' layer between states and zips/cities

[ilyaelbert]

Question

We have a large site that has a page for all 50 states. Each of these pages has unique content, but following the content has a MASSIVE amount of links for each zip AND city in that state. I am also in the process of creating unique content for each of these cities and zips HOWEVER, I was wondering would it make sense to create an additional 'county' layer between the states and the zips/cities. Would the additional 'depth' of the links bring down the overall rank of the long tail city and zip pages, or would the fact that the counties would knock the on page link count down from a thousand or so, to a management 50-100 substantially improve the overall quality and ranking of the site? To illustrate, currently I have

State -> city and zip pages (1200+ links on each state page)

what i want to do is do

state -> county (5-300 counties on each state page) -> city + zip (maybe 50-100 links on each county page). What do you guys think? Am I incurring some kind of automatic penalty for having 1000+ links on a page?

[TakeshiYoung]

1000 links per page is probably too much.  Google used to recommend having 100 or less, although their crawlers have improved a lot since then.

It all depends on how high your page authority is, because that pagerank is going to be split between each and every link on the page.  The more links you have on a page, the less pagerank each link will receive.  If you have a really high authority page, this is no problem, but if you're a medium to small site, I would recommend against it.  If you have a low authority page, Google may not even bother to crawl all the links on the page if it has too many.

So yes, splitting up those massive pages of links into smaller sub-pages makes a lot of sense.  Also, think from a user perspective what is going to be the best way to navigate your massive site.