Too many on page links

[BellaCupcakeCouture]

I'm new to the community and trying to work through my report card. It says I have too many on page links on several of our pages.

One example is for http://www.bellacupcakecouture.com/category/all10.htm it says we have 146. However I only see our products. Is there a way to fix this? My website manager says no.
Another example is http://www.bellacupcakecouture.com/category_17/pink-cupcake-wrappers.htm that
says we have 201 links. Again it appears to be all our products. Will we lose ranking because of this?

[josh-riley]

I have the same problem with lots of links - it's the way our site is structured and our products show on a page. Plus all the links at the top and bottom (keep in mind the mega menus at the top of the page, when you hover over them, the drop down links appear).

While it's not ideal, which is why it's something that gets flagged, you aren't alone in this and the chances of it being impactful in rankings is slim. I've managed to do quite well for many pages and I got more links going on.

[UnderRugSwept]

The "too many on-page links" warning is merely a suggestion. It's not likely to hurt your rankings; it's more to remind you that it is believed Google only crawls and follows the first fifty or 100 (it's debated) links on a page.

[WhoWuddaThunk]

The number of links on a given page does impact the amount of internal link juice that is passed across the site.  A really really really rough estimate people use is that each page on your site is able to pass out 90% of it's authority evenly to all the pages it links to.

This is just a made up example:

lets say that your page has 100 points of authority to pass.  With 100 links on the page, each page gets 1 point of authority.  On the other hand, if you only had 10 links on the page, each page would receive 10 points of authority.  So, the more links you have on a page the less authority you are passing on to the pages you link to.

Now, the positioning and context have a lot of control on how the authority is passed, so not all links are equal.  The general consensus is that the main menu has the most authority, body has the second most and the footer has the least.

Anyway, the reason why it is marked is what Marisa said, but I believe they left it because it's something you should consider when designing your website.  You should do your best to control your authority/page rank/link juice flow around your website.  The best way to do that is deciding what pages are going to be in the main menu, and which ones will appear in sub-menus.

[UnderRugSwept]

Yes, I agree. This is a good answer. I am, however, skeptical of the amount of 'link juice' one internal page on your website can really pass. I'd still consider this an issue not to lose sleep over. And while it is good to consider positioning of links and how they could potentially pass on value, overdoing it could be considered page-rank sculpting. But I agree overall.

[WhoWuddaThunk]

I've actually had this discussion a few times   My prime example is always The Telegraph who was SEO'd by Distilled (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/).  If you look at their menu structure they utilize submenus for each section to limit the number of links on a given page.  Granted, they have a massive amount of authority, but they are still trying to best harness how it passes through the website.

By clicking on 'World News' you get a sub-menu of different regions.  By clicking 'European News' you get another sub-menu for different countries/topics in Europe.

This allows you to pump as much authority as you can into your main topics, and makes sure that you have the most relevant links while in the sub-topics.

So, if ranking internal pages isn't important in your strategy, go ahead and forget about it.  However, if you want your deeper pages to rank well you should consider how reckless you are with your internal links.  You will be pleasantly surprised by the results.