How many links (internal) is too many?

Question

Let's have some fun shall we??

At the bottom of the content for about 1/3rd of my pages, but not in the footer, I create an internal link for each related IP address to the page on my site for that IP address. This was fine 6 months ago, but now that my database has grown so large, I discovered that it was not uncommon to create 700+ links within this section with one page having 2600. Ooopppsss!! ;-) Houston, we have a problem!

Now this is easy enough to fix. For right now, I put a limit 100 on the query. But this got me thinking and searching for a definitive answer. So far... no luck.

Please understand I do fully know the effects regarding SEO. Most of you know that already. I am not looking for a lesson- just an idea of a range.

Q: How many internal links per page is too many?

There are a lot of answers on the net culled from various nether regions and I have a number in mind (also culled), but I was thinking that there has to be an authoritative answer somewhere. Google says reasonable and MOZ's answer seemed to very arbitrary to me. Some so-called SEO experts say as little as 6 and as much as 200. Yeah. That is useful! One said there is no limit. I know there is a semi-flexible practical limit. I remember reading about this years ago, but cannot remember the mechanics behind it right now. I would have to think on this for a while.

Bonus Q: If given a choice of creating links from a random query (and yes I can do this) or first 100 or so (using limit), which would you prefer/advise and why? Again, I have an idea in mind (again, culled). Is there anything definitive in this regard as well?

My primary concerns are UX, download speed, and lastly, Giigle. (<= please do not edit to change)

Answer 1

Here is a visualization of the number of links on the homepages of top 98 webpages. Very few have less than 100, and many have 500 or more.

Google used to recommend that any page have no more than 100 links per page. However, they removed the "100 links per page" from the webmaster guidelines some time ago. Matt Cutts released a video where he says that the limits for page size and number of links per page are much higher than they used to be.

I've personally worked on a website with 250-400 links on every page. That site did very well in search engines.

I'm not sure what the upper limit today actually is. I'd keep it at no more than 500 if I were you. Above that and I'd think your site would be an outlier compared to other websites.

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Unrelated to the number of links per page, your website about IP addresses is likely going to have other ranking problems if you have a page for every IP address. That is a lot of pages and most of them are not going to have much content. You probably only want to submit the pages with the most content to search engines.

I remember that Google was trying to remove phone number sites from its index a few years ago. Partly that was because so many of them had "Be the first to say something about this phone number" style blank pages.

Answer 2

Ideal would probably be 50. 100 works too if you want to go on the higher side.

Taking your points one at a time:

• UX: Unless I misunderstood how this website is to be used, a search feature would be much more useful than a list of IP addresses. That way, people can look up the domain or IP of any websites that they have had issues with. However, maybe if someone is simply looking for spam IP addresses, this could be useful to them. In that case, it may be more advantageous to simply have a page listing the IP addresses and domains in a table with different "pages" for each category (hack attempts, spammers, and stealth bots). That page could be linked to instead. If you still wanted to stick with the links on the bottom, I would say random works best since seeing only a small, static section every time when visiting the site becomes old. If you were to take the random approach, a maximum of 50 would be needed I would say.

• Download Speed: I honestly doubt having 50-100 links on a page would affect it barely at all...

• Google: As with everything, Google seems to answer that it should be optimized for users more than for search engines. They also say that 100 is suggested, but it is not a hard limit. Matt Cutts even says himself that:

  These days, Google will index more than 100K of a page, but there’s still a good reason to recommend keeping to under a hundred links or so: the user experience. If you’re showing well over 100 links per page, you could be overwhelming your users and giving them a bad experience. A page might look good to you until you put on your “user hat” and see what it looks like to a new visitor.

Answer 3

My primary concerns are UX, download speed, and lastly, Gaggle.

oops... I meant giigle, or maybe googoogaagaagle.

Ok, back to the real issues.

To me, I think having a ridiculously huge number of links on a single page may cause a slight slowdown because when a robot scans a page, every single byte is downloaded from the server, and each minimally-crafted link requires 16 bytes with anchor text excluded. For example:

<a href=" "></a>

If you have 500 links, then that's 8 KB used just for code. You need to try to have a good code/text ratio on your website so search engines think you have content instead of black-hat techniques going on in the site. This means if you went with the 500 links, then you need to come up with almost 2000 characters of text users can see without adding additional HTML code just to meet 15% code/text ratio.

So to me personally, there is no magic number on the actual number of links one should limit themselves to, but if I have to define an absolute minimum, I'd go with two. One for a privacy policy page, and the other for the "next section" page.

The more links you have along with other HTML tags you have on the site, the more bytes one must download.

Bonus Q: If given a choice of creating links from a random query (and yes I can do this) or first 100 or so (using limit), which would you prefer/advise and why? Again, I have an idea in mind (again, culled). Is there anything definitive in this regard as well?

You're better off to go linear and take the first 100 in 99% of the cases because reading the data is straightforward, and the computer doesn't have to use extra clock cycles in figuring out random numbers and piecing random rows of data together. If you must go random, then at least do all database operations in memory without swapping kicking in.