Video transcription
Today’s question comes from Blind Five Year Old in San Francisco, California who wants to know:
Is Google’s 100 links per page guideline still valid, particularly given advanced CSS capabilities that allow tabs reveals that other treatments that allow more content in links on a page without degrading the user experience?
I’m really glad that somebody asked that question.
The original reason for recommending 100 links per page was pretty simple.
At one point, Google would only index 101 kilobytes of a page.And so we needed some heuristic to say, don’t make a page so incredibly long that will truncated it and not index the words at the end.
So we said, 101 kilobytes,100 links. That’s a pretty rough measure, but if you’re getting much beyond that then that’s a little unusual.
But that 100 links per page guideline dates back 8 or 9 or so years.So the web has changed and web pages tend to be a lot more rich.They tend to have a lot more information on them.
If you go back and compare now, versus say 10 years ago, average pages on the web.
So if you look very carefully, I believe that we have removed the guideline that says 100 links per page.
Now does that mean that you should instantly go in and throw 5,000 links all on one page?
That’s probably not going to be a good idea.Not only because it’s a bad user experience, but it might look like a link farm or like you’re stuffing a bunch of links in there.
But I wouldn’t necessarily hold to the idea that yes,there has to be 100 links on a page.
That was always in our technical guidelines.Which means we’re not going to consider it spam if you have
more than 100 links, but we might not index all of them.
But we have removed that guideline.
And so now it’s entirely reasonable that a rich page can have quite a few links before you really have to worry about running into any sort of issue where we might not follow every single link.
Now one thing to be aware of is, we do take the page rank of a page.And the page rank equation says you divide by the out degree.
So if you have 500 links on a page, you’re dividing that page’s page rank by 500 when you look at the outgoing links.
That’s according to the original page rank paper.
So that’s one thing to bear in mind.
You might not want to automatically go for hundreds and hundreds of links, or a thousand links.But think carefully about which pages are really important, and then try not to overwhelm your users with links that don’t really give them a lot of value or benefit.
Quick Answer: Not a guideline anymore. Do what is right for the page and users