Founder at M16 Marketing and a Forbes Agency Council member, Don is a leading marketing technologist on a mission to create success stories.
Creating links is an essential part of on-page search engine optimization (SEO). Visitors will use them for navigational purposes. They will click internal links and outbound links on your website to find new content. Search engines will follow these links as well. As they spider or crawl your website, they will move between pages via links. For a healthy on-page SEO strategy, though, you should avoid using too many links on any given page.
Why All Pages Need Links
All of your website’s pages should have links. Without links, visitors and search engines will remain stuck on those pages. Visitors won’t be able to navigate to other pages, and search engines like Google won’t be able to crawl other pages.
Pages without links are colloquially referred to as dead-end pages. They don’t offer any exit points. Visitors and search engine crawlers can enter dead-end pages, but they won’t be able to leave them by following links.
Links are a form of content. And like other forms of website content, they are valuable to visitors. They can direct visitors to important or relevant pages. Visitors can then stay longer on a website. Visitors may click a link on an initial entry page, and after landing on a new page, they may click a link to yet another page.
Whether it’s your homepage, a category page, a lower-level subpage or a blog post, you should use links on it. But again, when creating pages, you should avoid using too many links.
Google’s Link Limit
In the past, Google reportedly said that pages should have fewer than 100 links. It didn’t force webmasters to follow this link limit. Rather, Google’s guidelines stated that webmasters should use a reasonable number of links per page, with fewer than 100 links being the recommended limit. Google no longer has an explicit link limit. Google has since updated its guidelines to remove the link limit.
In a blog post, Matt Cutts explained the reasoning behind Google’s previous under-100-links-per-page recommendation. At the time, Google’s crawlers were only able to index the first 100KB of pages. Links counted toward this indexing limit. Therefore, Google recommended that webmasters use fewer than 100 links per page to ensure their pages would be fully indexed.
Google’s crawlers have become more advanced over the years. With its crawlers now able to index more page data as in the past, Google removed the under-100-links-per-page recommendation from its guidelines.
Bing’s Link Limit
Bing has similar recommendations regarding how many links webmasters should use on their pages. According to Bing’s guidelines, webmasters should use a reasonable number of links per page. It further states that pages should have no more than a few thousand links.
Exceeding this link limit won’t land your website in Bing’s penalty box, but it may restrict your website’s organic rankings on Bing.
Why You Shouldn’t Use Too Many Links
What’s wrong with using too many links exactly? Bing’s crawlers work in the same way as Google’s crawlers. They look for links on pages, which they follow to discover other pages. If a page has too many links, they may not follow all of them. Search engine crawlers may follow some of the page’s links while ignoring others.
If search engine crawlers don’t follow a link to a page, they may fail to index that page. If a page doesn’t get indexed, the page won’t rank in the search results, nor will it generate any search traffic. To encourage search engine crawlers to index all of your website’s pages, you should be conscious of how many links you use per page. Using a reasonable number of links will result in more pages being indexed.
Using too many links on any given page will also dilute the authority carried by those links. Links carry authority from source pages to destination pages. Source pages are the pages that feature links, whereas destination pages are the pages the links point to. If a page has thousands of links, its authority will be distributed throughout all of those destination pages. The destination pages will receive a small, insignificant amount of authority from the links. Using fewer links, in comparison, will result in more authority being passed to each destination page.
Another reason you shouldn’t use too many links is that it looks spammy. Websites that participate in spam may feature thousands of links per page. Some spam websites, in fact, consist almost entirely of links. If you overload your website’s pages with links, you’ll create the appearance of spam.
The more links you use on a page, the harder it will be to maintain the page. Links can stop working. If you delete a link’s destination page or change the destination page’s URL, it will stop working. Visitors may still be able to click the link, but it will take them to a 404 error page rather than the intended destination page.
Pages can have both internal and outbound links. Both types of links will count toward a page’s total number of links. Using too many outbound links can be particularly harmful. Outbound links are linked images or text that point to a page on another website. They essentially send visitors away from your site. If a page has too many outbound links, you may struggle to retain visitors. Visitors may click the outbound links without returning to your website.
There’s really no limit to how many links a page can feature. Some pages may require more links than others. But using too many links may prove harmful to your SEO efforts. For most pages, try to avoid using more than a few hundred links.
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2023/01/03/on-page-seo-how-many-links-is-too-many-on-a-webpage/