When you are doing search engine optimization (interesting, but little known fact is that the Danish term is søgemaskineoptimering) for your website, one of the most common questions popping up is how many links should you have on a certain web page and does this matter. The answer is – Yes, absolutely. There is a reasonable number of links that you should not exceed for the good of your own website.

The Magic Number

The magic number of maximum links per page was set to 100. This came from some Google sources and was recently mentioned again by Matt Cutts who quoted the Google Guidelines and said that people should keep the links on any given web page less than 100.

Penalties

Many people are afraid that they would get penalized if they have more than 100 links on a web page. This, however, is not the case at all. You won’t get your web page penalized or de-indexed just because you have 104 or 200 links. Google will probably start ignoring the links after a certain point and your page might not pass Page Rank but you won’t be penalized.

The number nowadays

The number “100” doesn’t seem to be very important nowadays. Seems like the important thing is for your web page to have a high authority. That way, even if you have more than 100 links, Google will take into consideration the web pages you recommend. Actually some people believe that the number “100” is now a bigger number so you should be alright with more than 100 links on a certain web page.

The importance

A lot of people wonder if the number of links they have placed on their web pages matter nowadays. The answer is yes. It totally matters. There is a relation between the amount of links you have on your page and the page rank. The thing is that the internal page rank each of the link passes is decreasing as the amount of links increases. So if you have hundreds of links, the result won’t be very satisfying. This is why it is recommended to keep the amount of links to a reasonable number and not exceed it if you can especially if you don’t even have a high page rank.

The right number

No one actually knows what the perfect number of links for a single web page is. Some people would say 100, other would suggest 150. It all depends on finding the perfect solution for yourself but it seems like the number 100 is still popular.

My advice is that you should try not to have too many links on a single web page. And if you after all want to have a lot of links on your page, at least make sure that you have a high authority. That way your links would matter and you will achieve better results.

Guest Post by Lyuben Georgiev