Campaign warnings and recommendations

[NeilTompkins]

How crucial is it to follow / fix the campaign warnings.  For example, even though our website is ranking well the campaign report is stating that we've too many links on the majority of pages and the title element is too long.

My question is if I make changes based on these recommendations, do you think that we will see a dramatic improvement in our rankings ?

[CPLDistribution]

Writing engaging title tags that do not exceed the max length could lead to an increased click through rate. This may not have a massive impact on your rankings but it could potentially drive more traffic to your site.

Having too many links will reduce the amount of internal 'link juice' that each link will pass. if  you reduce the number of links by a couple you will not see much impact but a larger cull could potentially boost the rankings of the pages you choose to focus on. The following blog may be useful to read:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many

With all the warning I think you need to evaluate the amount of work vs the potential impact and prioritise accordingly.

[RyanKent]

All aspects of SERPs is comparative in nature. You can rank #1 with a crappy site, as long as everyone else who is competing for the same keyword has worse pages then you.

Sometimes you can make a big positive change to your site and not change rankings at all. Other times you can make a minor tweak and jump up a few notches. There is no way to offer any quality generic advice here.

What I would suggest is to make a list of all SEO improvements which can be made to your site, then prioritize that list. Items on your most popular pages should take priority over less popular pages. Items involving major factors such as your page's title should be prioritized over items which are relatively less important such as too many links on a page.

You asked "how crucial is it to [make changes]". Only you can answer that question. How crucial is it for you to try and improve your rankings for the given page?

[dmac]

I have found that fixing problems pointed out by google leads to good things. I also learned the hard way that ignoring them for too long will eventually result in punishment. I would make any suggested changes, or at least try it for a while and see what happens.

[NeilTompkins]

I note your point, but global newspaper sites as a example have hundreds of links per page - so I shall assume that as our site is already very well ranked it should not cause a future problem ?

[RyanKent]

Global newspapers usually have very high DA and extremely high PA for their main page and category pages. Sites with higher DA/PA are crawled more frequently and deeper then other sites.

Time magazine has over 250 links on it's home page. If I was asked to do SEO work for Time, I would use the SEOmoz campaign tool, the warning for too many links would appear and I would disregard the warning. I realize Time.com's 97 PA and 98 DA fully supports the crawling of those links. Even so, I would still review the links to ensure there are not any opportunities for improvement, but overall the site is fine in this regard.

In short, if you are happy with your site's performance in SERPs go ahead and disregard the warning. If you are looking for opportunities to improve, you can investigate the matter further.

[CPLDistribution]

All I can do is echo Ryan's point on this one, he does a great job of summing it up.