What's the best strategy for reducing the number of links on a blog post?

[TaitLarson]

I'd like to optimize my blog better for search.  The first reccomendation I got from my SEOMoz Pro Campaign Crawl was that I needed to reduce the number of links per page on my site. I have lots of links from navigational items in the sidebar that people do click on. I'd really like to keep some or all of the tags and categories I list. Comments are another issue.  Most of our posts get about 10 comments.  However, our best posts get 50-100 comments.  Those comments create a lot of links.

I was planning on attempting to reduce the number of links using javascript but I guess Google understands javascript now.  I may still do this b/c our pages are huge and some progressive rendering would likely help the user experience.

Can you use javascript (ajax or otherwise) to limit the number of links on your page in a way that helps your SEO efforts?  Any specific suggestions for reducing links that come from comments and navigational items?

How much will reducing the number of links on a given page help with SEO?  Any simple way to estimate or quantify this without diving in?

Thanks in advance!

[EGOL]

Those comments create a lot of links"

There is what I would ATTACK. A lot of those links are placed there by people who probably don't give a rat's behind about your content - they are simply there to drop a link on you.  Consider the content of these comments and ask if they are honest contributors.

I would disable links in comments or moderate them out.

"How much will reducing the number of links on a given page help with SEO?"

I believe that relevant links are helpful for SEO.  However, I also believe that if you have a blog about knitting and it is getting links dropped on it to men's health products, hotels in Turkey and online casinos, then you better pray that Google doesn't drop your rankings.

I have a blog and used to allow comments.  I turned them off because even with a plug-in to block spam comments a lot of undesired comments were getting in.   Some comments came from people who are in my industry but were trying to use my blog as a signpost for their business.  So, I cut the comments and now run a bully pulpit.  Less work for me and less odor on the blog.

I was sad to lose comments from a few genuine contributors... but this is a better balance for me.

[TaitLarson]

Thanks EGOL.  To be clear, we remove most comments with links embedded in the text (unless they are relevant).  However the "website" field of the comment form creates a nofollow link to a site if filled in.

I don't want to remove comments.  People really do contribute in our comments section.  Having comments show people stopping by our blog that we have a nice little community of readers.  While there is some abuse we work to remove spammy comments and blacklist domains that continue to spam us.

[EGOL]

It sounds like you are getting good contributions and are doing a proper job of blocking the weasels.

What do you think of eliminating the "website" field of the comment form?  I would eliminate it if it was on my site.

[TaitLarson]

That seems like a pretty practical solution.  Some people won't stop by any more but those are the people who are just trying to promote themselves. I wonder if it might actually increase comments b/c now the form will be even shorter and simpler to fill out.

[RyanPurkey]

Hi Tait.  I went through one of the blog posts with 20+ comments and saw that most of the links via user names are pretty wedding relevant--wedding photographers, profiles back to your own site, some broken links--plus they're already nofollowed already. It'd be a good idea to apply nofollow to the individual comment links as well below the user name.

If you have the SEOmoz toolbar you can turn on "Show Nofollows" here and see all the different links the 'moz is disregarding.  All the "Browse Category" links at left are nofollowed, the section tags, and the function links (Add Image or Video URLs...) I think you could take a similar tack with your blog and apply any incoming link juice to a few select links that are the focus of that blog post.  That way you're leaving the option open for people to be social via your blog and provide links for people to click, but the technical focus is around your target keywords.

To get more insight on where you could apply nofollows, just leave the "Show Nofollows" highlighter on in the tool bar and surf the web for a bit: competitors, blogs that would likely be in a competitive niche, etc.  You should be able to get a pretty good idea fairly quickly from that exercise.

Last, coming up with hooks for people to link back in to individual blog posts would be handy as any juice coming in would then be redistributed to your most targeted links.

[TaitLarson]

Hey Ryan, thanks for taking a look.   nofollowing the comment links is a good idea!

I'm under the assumption the assumption that nofollow links are still hurting my SEO efforts do to how Google passes page rank through links.

Thanks for the tips on looking at other blogs and seeing how they use nofollow.  Again, I guess the big guestion is should I be reducing the number of links on my site (including the number of nofollow links).

Can you give a more specific example of "hooks for people to link back to"?

[TaitLarson]

Anyone have any thoughts about whether or not I should attempt to reduce the number of links in the sidebar via javascript? I've got 160 navigational links.  Should I try to load these in via Javascript?  How would Google react to that?

[RyanPurkey]

Your domain strength is pretty high, so on your home page and top pages, those navigational links are going to be fine, but you could nofollow the bulk of them on the individual blog pages.

You already have the tweet and facebook like buttons that are getting use, but you might be able to add some easy to copy & paste code, similar to a badge, to try and boost inbound links (http://www.seomoz.org/dp/badges). Also, since you have so much content you could try getting a Polyvore-like feature added to your site that helps people make a collage from the different wedding details they like. (http://www.polyvore.com/).

I didn't dig too deeply so these are just off-the-cuff examples, but hopefully enough to spark some ideas for you.