Transferring link juice on a page with over 150 links

[flo2]

I'm building a resource section that will probably, hopefully, attract a lot of external links but the problem here is that on the main index page there will be a big number of links (around 150 internal links - 120 links pointing to resource sub-pages and 30 being the site's navigational links), so it will dilute the passed link juice and possibly waste some of it. Those 120 sub-pages will contain about 50-100 external links and 30 internal navigational links.

In order to better visualise the matter think of this resource as a collection of hundreds of blogs categorised by domain on the index page (those 120 sub-pages). Those 120 sub-pages will contain 50-100 external links

The question here is how to build the primary page (the one with 150 links) so it will pass the most link juice to the site or do you think this is OK and I shouldn't be worried about it (I know there used to be a roughly 100 links per page limit)? Any ideas?

Many thanks

[JaneCopland]

Hi Flo,

I think it totally depends on the usefulness of the page and perhaps the ratio of links to supporting text / resources. A page with 150+ links certainly isn't automatically useless, and many big sites have that number of links on most of their pages due to navigational elements, long blog posts with multiple citations, outbound links from comments (albeit nofollowed), etc.

The 100 links per page limit is (hopefully) rather outdated and stems from when Google visited each page with a limit of how much data it could process. Very long, heavy pages would not be properly crawled, so their links wouldn't be properly crawled either, and PR would not pass properly out of all the links on the page. Google is now much more advanced and is used to dealing with a wide variety of page sizes.

A page with over 150 links can certainly perform well and there should not be a problem with appearing spammy or overdone if each link is contributing to the aim of the page. As I said previously, I would also try to include a fairly good amount of supporting text (or whatever type of supporting resource is appropriate - images, video, etc.) so that the page is not solely a list of links.

Hope this helps!

Jane

[flo2]

Hi Jane,

Many thanks for you thoughts, highly appreciated.

The website itself has a kind of below average authority I'd say (DA 30 & PR 3) and that main index page will probably have just a few sentences (it will be just an index that will send the visitors to the right sub-page that will have the actual content). It is kind solely a list of links that will put the users on the right track.

Any ideas if successfully fetching as Google (from within GWT) will indicate they will crawl the page entirely (I know that the supposed 100 links per page limit was more like 100KB crawl limit, very hard to believe that this is still true as the average page size nowadays is north of 300KB https://developers.google.com/speed/articles/web-metrics)?

Thanks

[JaneCopland]

Hey Flo,

Good news! This went up literally yesterday: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-link-unlimited-18468.html

See the longer discussion here: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/alde4GNOWp0/discussion

This is the first time a Googler has confirmed the lack of a limit on the crawling of internal links

[flo2]

Hi Jane,

Many thanks for that, good news indeed.