Matt Cutts On Linking Guidelines: How Many Links On A Page?

One of the foremost speculated questions asked regarding SEO is How Many Links should you have on your page? Matt Cutts conferred a very simple yet precise explanation to the question.

Matt Cutts is a webmaster leading the team of Webspam at Google; he recently shared few guidelines on the linking concept, giving a clear picture of how links per page concept works. When it comes to the number of links on any page there was a clear guideline by Google stating the reasonable amount that adds up to about a 100 or not more than a 100 links per page.

Is 100 Links per page really the limit? Well the Webmaster Matt disagrees, he says this concept was introduced few years ago, and the Web as well as the Web pages has evolved with time, so it is implicit to have aggregators or lot more links on a page. He specifies about the earlier system saying; the earlier guidelines of Google were based on Googlebot or its indexing system which would truncate at 100 or 100k and anything past that wouldn’t even get indexed. This might make you to think any link on the far side of 100 might be considered as spam, but the answer is NO.

Matt says this old guidelines have been revised and now the number of links per page has been increased to a very reasonable value, with this new enhanced guidelines the limit of the file size has also been increased, also increasing the number of links that can be processed on a page.

So now the question arises whether we can keep any number of links on a page? Well clearing this perplexity Matt says that the page rank flowing through all outlinks gets divided by the number of outlinks present, thus reducing the page rank flowing through every individual link. Thus if you have a lot of links than it will not only reduce the individual page rank but also sometimes annoy the user and make it appear spammy. So number of links can definitely be more than hundred but should still be restricted to a certain reasonable value. After revising from the old guidelines he says it is common to have around 200 to 300 links or even more if the page is long and has substantial amount of information and value add. But even with this enhancement if you have tons and tons of links sometimes it might be considered as spam, so remember to keep your site with good amount of value add content and useful information.

Concluding with the guidelines he advised not to worry anymore with the 100 links criteria as it has been revised and improved with new and better guidelines, but still it would be preferable to essentially look at the page through viewers’ eyes and see that it does not look spammy or annoying, with this criteria fulfilled, then there is not much to worry about, just follow the guidelines of the webmaster and optimize your website.

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