More than 100 internal links from a page

[PottyScotty]

Hi, we have been developing our new site and improving the internal linking for 2 reasons, 1 to improve spidering and 2 to up sell more to customers.  The error reports from SEOMoz are showing our biggest problem is too many internal links from 2000+ pages.  How much of an impact does it have by having say 180 internal links compared to say 99 on a page?

Our website has been moving up the SERPs so should i worry about it or should I ignore the warnings and continue with the menu system and internal linking we have in place already?

Thanks

[PaulRogers]

One of my clients has the same problem, so I looked at some of the biggest websites within the industry, and they also share the same issue and have more than 200 internal links on their homepage and the majority of their internal pages.

I would say that it wouldn't have a massive impact upon your rankings or PA if you were to reduce the amount of internal links, but you could use the nofollow tag tactically to do so. For example: if you have a link to a page within your top navigation, you could nofollow a link to the same page if it's also featured within your footer or sidebar.

This is just an example. I wouldn't recommend doing this, but it's an easy way around the problem if you're keen to resolve it and it won't have an impact upon usability.

[PottyScotty]

Cool good idea, the problem I have is when we suggest products that maybe similar, not sure if we can automatically add nofllow tags, also like you I've never been to kean on it.  I'm hoping that google will see we are linking to relevant pages because they are relevant and not because its SEO driven.  The links on most pages are different so some pages have less than 90 while other have 200+ (the further u drill into the site the more links naturally appear).  What I have not seen is the pages with 200 links doing any worse or better than the ones with 100.

[PaulRogers]

I wouldn't worry about it, as long as you don't have a huge amount, I wouldn't expect this to make much of a difference either way.

I'd recommend focusing on other aspects of on-page optimisation and building really good links.

Paul

[Svetoslav]

I've worked for a website with 100+ internal links on most of its pages. In 4 years, the bot never got confused.

At one point it looked ridiculous. After the owners refused to remove the footer links and other duplicate ones I went ahead with nofollow attribute on the links I consider to have close to no value for users and search engines.

We impelemnted nofollow by marking all internal links with a unique ID. E.g if a link to the live chat form the footer of the site got ID #4112 on the home page, it had the same ID through the rest of the pages. I then got all the ID I want to have the attribute and gave them back to the developers. This approach had one great advantage - it minimized the chance of human error to only me restricting the wrong link. Nothing was lost in translation.

[Svetoslav]

Yes, I can't say I saw dramatic changes in the rankings after I got the internal links beneath the "esoteric" 100.

[CPU]

Hi guys

Here is a video of Matt Cutts talking about this matter.

Hope it helps.