Too many on page links

[Horlogeboetiek]

Hi All,

As we all know, having to much links on a page is an obstacle for search engine crawlers in terms of the crawl allowance. My category pages are labeled as pages with to many "one page" links by the SEOmoz crawler. This probably comes from the fact that each product on the category page has multiple links (on the image and model number).

Now my question is, would it help to setup a text-link with a clickable area as big as the product area? This means every product gets just one link. Would this help get the crawlers deeper in these pages and distribute the link-juice better? Or is Google smart enough already to figure out that two links to the same product page shouldn't be counted as two?

Thanks for your replies guys.

Rich

[DeptAgency]

Since creating more than one link to some URL from one page does not increase the linkjuice that is passed to that URL, I recon that Crawlers understand that these are identical links. This isn't easy to verify though...

[j0a0vargas]

This probably would not work well. We should avoid as much trying to cheat search engines.

I do not know if I understand perfectly, but have you thought about remove the links in the categories and let them only when it enters the product. As I understand it, there are many links in the following categories on products area, is it?

[Horlogeboetiek]

@Expand Online: You are absolutely right when you say more links don't pass the double amount of link juice, but I hear stories that a second link does pass a bit of link juice and takes away some of the advantage. Just wondering if it helps to make sure you just have one link for each product without thing away the usability for the visitor.

@João Vargas: It's not about cheating a search engine, it's just trying to make sure we are not wasting any unnecessary search engine resources. I'm not to sure what you mean with the second paragraph in your message though.

[Dr-Pete]

First off, it's more of a balancing act than a hard/fast rule. I wrote a post about the 100 links "limit" last year, just for reference:

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

Generally, though Expand Online is right - tests seem to show that Google ignores the 2nd, 3rd, etc. link to any Page B from Page A. While we still count those individual links, it shouldn't pose major problems for internal link-juice flow. Google consolidates them, for the most part. It may not be 100%, but it's close enough that you're probably ok in most cases.

It can be very situational, though. In practice, I find the additional links are sometimes unnecessary or even confusing for visitors, so pruning them down is always worth reviewing. I wouldn't create one mega-link, though - it can behave funny cross-browser, and it'll create odd-looking anchor text. If it's a choice of that or leaving things alone, I'd leave things alone.