Too many onpage links

[Romaine]

We got the weekly seomoz reports and see that most of our pages and posts contain too many onpage links.

I checked our website and all of our pages have a header, footer and left side menu. I did the math and there are 13 links in the header, 26 links in the footer and 76 links in the left side menu. This means that all of our post and pages have 115 links at the start.

So what do I do? Do I remove the left side menu from the posts' layout and use only the footer and header? Or do I add nofollow links?

Thanks!

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Romaine

The campaign tool is making a general recommendation based on the best practice advice of only having 100 links tops on a page. That is all fine and dandy but the reality is that this has to be thought about in the context of your site and your users.

What this ultimately means is that you are spreading the internal page rank between those 115 pages fairly evenly. Now, if those 115 pages are all of equal importance then great, but if not, if some of them are just blog categories or the like then you are missing an opportunity to promote the most important pages in your internal hierarchy.

To decide what to do try asking yourself these questions:

• What are my most important pages?
• Can I restructure my site so the less important pages are linked to from elsewhere?

What you will probably find is that you can rethink your navigation and lose the side bar or make that a navigation element on a sub page. This focusses the internal page rank on the important pages and still allows you to provide navigation where needed.

It's hard to give a general answer on any of this stuff as there are so many moving parts and it all depends on what is right for your site and your users. This is a good read by the ever readable and reliable Dr. Pete on the subject:

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

Hope that helps and certainly fire over a link and I will take a look and feedback.

In the meanwhile, this is not optimal, but it's not the end of the world either so don't blow a gasket!

Hope that helpsMarcus