Limit The Number of Link In A Web Page

Unfortunately, although the idea to limit number of link in a web page seems reasonable, many of us still come up with a web page that has too many link. Maybe knowing the reason why too many link is a not a good idea will help… Maybe we do not really “see” the link hence we put too many unintended link…

Anyway below is a quick look why we should limit the number of link on ever website.

3 Reasons Why We Should Limit No of Link In a Web Page

1. There is penalty of having too many link

Ever heard of “link farm”? This is a web page that the content is no other than *just* link. (Maybe thousand of that “<a href…>” tag on the source code).
Why people want to build such web page? Well, there was a day that people sell and buy that kind of link to boost their rank on search engine, then the big search engine imposed penalty of such web page to be considered as spam – link spam that is. Also, since there is nothing else on the page, such page will be  hardly amusing to any human visitor.
So, if you ever see this kind of horrible page, it’s natural that you will think “no, I don’t want my website to be penalized by having too many link.”..

But just how many is too many? Obviously 1000 is too many. But how about 100? As we as public technically do not know what is the exact formula/rules any search engine has, we can only refer to “common sense”. Well I do think 100 is still too many. Imagine if you want to see all the link inside a web page – clicking 100 link will be awfully too difficult.

Too many link in tag clouds

2. Search Engine’s Spider / Bots has limit too

Consider that any search engine’s spider a.k.a bots are actually a computer program. And one of the thing that computer programmer make sure does not happen in a program is what so called “endless loop” – this is where the program keep repeting the command over and over again without conclusion exhausting resources (memory and/nor harddisk space, etc) – on day to day term we call it “hung up” or crash.

So in order to cater as many as possible web page on internet, I don’t think a web crawler a.k.a spider can be allowed to sit in just 1 page because that page has ten thousands of link. Therefore the programmer need to impose a limit, say 1000, 100 or 200 (again, nobody knows). If we have more link than that upper limit, then the  rest of the link will not be seen by the spider. But can we control which link that should be seen and which one important one… That’s almost impossible.

Therefore, what can we do?…Yes, just limit any link on our website to a number that considered “normal”.

3.  Save your “Link Juice”.

If you remember the basic of how a backlink can make a webpage higher in search engine rank, then having too many link (internal or external) will reduce those juice to be passed over to your link. For example: if you have a web page with PR3, you have only certain amount of link juice to be shared to any of your link – say you only have 10 links, then each probably get 3 drop of the juice – but if you have 30 link, probably each only get 1 drop of that imaginary link juice.

This is one of the reason why the attribute “nofollow” is being used – to prevent the link juice to get pass over. Perfect if the spider a.k.a bots obey this attribute – apparently many bots did not really fully respect the attribute (they still just go jump to that link regardless of the attribute)

So, again – the easiest to control this is just to limit the link itself at the first place.

Common Offender

Number one offender in my mind is those “tag clouds” especially from WordPress blog (see picture). You should limit your tag cloud (see picture) to maximum 20 or 30 item only. More than that will give headache to your human visitor and upset the robot visitor.

The second big offender would be those LHS (Left Hand Side) menu items on a e-commerce website that list 1001 category of product. The way to do it is to group and sub categorized them. Perhaps do it using javascript menu (that is not visible by the spider). Limit the overall menu to 20-30 items only.

I see this on most of the blogs: at the end or beginning of an article, usually there is a list of tags that want to be emphasized on that article. Although, it is crucial for the purpose of the reader (who want to know the key important content) and for the indexing, the tag does not necessary have to be linked to tag page. As long as the word is there, it will get indexed. But you do not need to put link on those tags list.

Also not really necessary to repeat of the same link over and over again. Yes, it may be considered that the higher positioned link will implied more important link than the lower one, but having the same link repeated over and over and over again is just annoying.

Conclusion

So in general, for the purpose of your article contents probably you will need 5 to 10 link (usually external). Another 10 or so for the infrastructure of the web page (Home link, contact us, about us, term and condition, subscribe feed, etc) – then if you must another 20-30 for those tag clouds, menu, or everything else. Luckily all javascript generated content (including Google’s adsense) is not visible and counted as active link. So, in total about 50 links are the maximum number of link that you need to aim.

Try to limit your link, regardless whether it’s internal or external – not only to prevent clutter on your page, but to optimized the SEO result that you expect. But even if you don’t care about SEO at all, having too many link in a web page is an eyesore anyway. Don’t do it. Keep it around 50 links or less!

TIPS: Install “Search Status” plugin/add-on on your Firefox – it has “Link Report” that give you the exact info about your link in that page.

Go start updating your theme files on your website…!
Take care !

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