Google: Maximum Number Of Links Per Page

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 10. January 2008 - 0:00

In the old days, Google would not index pages larger than 100k. 100k is very big, especially since the 100k did not include graphics. Now Google does index the pages larger than 100k but you will get penalized. At the same time, Google was bombarded by link stuffing with pages have thousands of link. So Matt Cutts with his engineers decided to penalize web pages with more than 100 links.

What does this mean?

  • You shouldn't have a "cloud" because you will be penalized by Google.
  • You shouldn't have a large blog roll on your home page.
  • Should you keep the number of links at 99? Try to stay well under the 100 links in your home page.
  • You can always create another web page for all your links. That web page will be penalized, but not your home page.
  • If you end up with hundreds of links on a page, Google will have to decide if it will follow the links and it will have to decide if it want to index these links.
  • If you have hundreds of links on a page, you're dividing the Page Rank of that page between hundreds of links, so each link is only going to pass along a minuscule amount of Page Rank.
  • One way of going around this limit, is to exclude these links in the ROBOTS.TXT file, the file that tells Google which pages are to be excluded from it's crawling and indexing.