Max # of recommended links per page?

[cadenzajon]

I've heard it said that Google may choose to stop following links after the first 100 on a page. The landing/category pages for my site's product catalog have earned quite a respectable PR and positioning in search results, and I'm currently paginating their product listings (about 200 products in a category) so that only a couple dozen products are shown on the first page, with links to "next page" and "previous page" being accomplished via query string (i.e. "?page=3").

An alternative option I have is to link to 100% of the contained products within the category's landing page (which would increase my on-page link count to ~300) and use CSS/Javascript to allow the user to simulate browsing between pages on the client side.

My goal is to see as many of my product pages indexed as possible. Is this done better using my current scheme (where Googlebot would have to navigate to, say, Landing Page -> Page 6 -> Deeply Buried Product Page) or in the alternative method above, where all the links are in a single page? Since my landing pages are currently treated pretty well by search engines, would that "trust" cause them to follow more links than might normally be done?

Thank you!

[AlanBleiweiss]

Jonathan,

The "rule" used to be 100 links to a page based on Google having included that in their guidelines.  They've since removed that numeric value without replacing it with another number.  What I find in my large client sites where there's hundreds or thousands of products in a category is the pagination method.  The key is to ensure to append each page's Title, URL and h1 with "Page X".

This is best simply because it helps ensure Google discovers all the products and properly credits them to the core category.  By trying to force all of the products onto a single page, and using any method that hides most initially for usability, you introduce the possibility that not all those products will be discovered, no matter how much Google does a "good" job at discovering links inside CSS or JavaScript. In reality, their system is far from perfect, and with all that added code, the possibility exists that you cause crawl problems due to imperfect code.