Too many links on your blog?

[AdoptionHelp]

In all of my campaigns, I have a lot of URLs with too many links on the page (defined loosely as around or over 100 links per page); these links are virtually all found on blog pages. The link count shoots up quickly when you start using things like tag clouds, showing all the tags/categories a post is in, in addition to all the cross linking thats typical of blog posts.

My question is: Does this matter?

Do you work to get blog pages down under that 100 link limit, or just assume most blogs are like this and move along? If you think it does matter, what strategies have you used to cut down the number of links while still keeping popular elements like tag clouds?

[deltasystems]

Hi Ryan.

Hitting the 100-link warning is usually best ignored if you are an eCommerce store. Stores often can't help hitting the limit with large navigations, sub-menus, and then product images/titles. This is fine.

For a blog this is less common. I would be interested in knowing why you are in excess of 100 links. Personally I would work towards lowering the link count because it divides the strength the page gives to each link.

Matt Cutts does not recommend using tag clouds. There are several studies on the matter that prove Matt isn't lying: do a quick Google search to get a few of them. When you think about it, they don't really offer the visitor anything. I would suggest removing the tag cloud.

Cutts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYPX_ZmhLqg

[irvingw]

Another issue with excessive linking on every page is that you are diluting your page uniqueness and you may get flagged due to having a large ratio of duplicate pages. I would strongly recommend you limit the number of links on your primary landing pages to the links that people are most interested in and/or mostly related to the page content. In the same vein, any mass of content (author bios, disclaimer, etc..) that is on every page of the website needs to be examined and optimized.

[onqmarketing]

Thanks Zachary..I hadn't seen this video by Matt. Handy information..

[CliffordC]

I'm curious about this as well. My site which is just a blog currently has a warning of 200 or more links. Since it's a blog is this ok? On average, I have about 5 - 6 links per post. I think SEOMOZ crawler is counting everything as one page which is where it's pulling it's 200+ from.