SEO: Navigation Part 5 – Limit the Number of Links
People often want to incorporate a page of links on their site but it’s never really made much sense to me. A link out of your site is just like a leak in a pipe where your visitors are allowed to leak out of your site. Not to mention that links out of your site are proven to lower your Google PageRank. Google sees the links out of your site as a vote for the other site and takes a small part of your page’s PageRank and essentially gives it to the receiving page. The receiving page sees a boost and your site sees a drop in PageRank and a corresponding drop in overall ranking in Google’s SERPS.
If you find a site that has a page with hundreds of links to other sites, notice the PageRank in your Google Tool Bar. Invariably, pages like that have a PR 0. They can’t bleed off any more rank so they go to zero.
Furthermore, Google sees sites that have tons of links as worthless because they have no value in their site other than links to external sources. If the site had valuable content, then they wouldn’t need to link to other sites, would they? If you must create a page of links, NEVER exceed 100 links per page. Create multiple pages if you have to. And consider using the nofollow command to tell Google to not bleed off your PageRank.
Chadd Bryant
