According to Google Webmaster “Design and content guidelines” it is recommended to “Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).”

Why is such recommendation by Google and What if you decide to ignore that guidance?

The reason is that, Google generally index only about 100 KB of a page. Having 100 links on a given page would keep the page under 100 KB, at the same time also maintaining a reasonable number of links per page. If a page started to have more than 100 links, there is possibility of getting truncated by Google and the entire page would not be indexed.

Nowadays, though Google index more than 100 KB of a page, but so far as “user experience” is concerned it’s still good sticking to under 100 links or so. If you are showing more than 100 links per page, you visitors could be overwhelmed and the end result would be a “bad experience” for your visitors!

A page might look good to you until you put on your “user hat” and see what it looks like to a new visitor.

Having more than 100 links on a given page makes sense, in some cases though. So, Does Google automatically consider a page spam if your page has over 100 links? According to Matt Cutts, Head of Google’s Webspam Team, the answer to this question is:

No, not at all. The “100 links” recommendation is in the Google Webmaster “Design and content” guidelines section, and it’s the Quality guidelines that contain the things that we consider webspam (stuff like hidden text, doorway pages, installing malware, etc.). If those 100 links on a given page are hidden or keyword-stuffed, it would be spam. But pages with lots of links are not automatically considered spammy by Google.

So, how a page over 100 links might be treated by Google?

Google might choose not to follow or to index all those links, if you are showing 100′s of links. Because in such a scenario, the PageRank of that page is divided between 100′s of links and as a result each link is only going to pass along a microscopic amount of PageRank. Finally, users often dislike link-heavy pages. So, before putting tons of links on a given page, ask yourself what the purpose of the page is and if it should work well for the user experience.

Suggested Readings:

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