Understanding Internal Link Structure
It is important to ensure that your website has a well thought out internal link structure.
In addition to your standard page menu structure, providing extra links on a page to other relevant pages of your site will help users find the information they are looking for, more quickly. These additional links will also help search engines navigate your site more easily. If the anchor text used for the link contains your targeted keywords then these types of links will also help to improve the overall Link Popularity of your site.
Google has confirmed that you should use less than 100 internal links per page.
According to a recent Blog post by Google’s, Matt Cutts, you should use fewer than 100 internal links, per page.
“The original reason we provided that recommendation is that Google used to index only about 100 kilobytes of a page. When we thought about how many links a page might reasonably have and still be under 100K, it seemed about right to recommend 100 links or so. If a page started to have more than that many links, there was a chance that the page would be so long that Google would truncate the page and wouldn’t index the entire page.
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” states Matt.
The “100 links” recommendation is also mentioned in the Google Webmaster Guidelines, Design and Content Section, which states:
- Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
- Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
- Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).
Of course, there may be some instances where you might have a completely valid reason for having over 100 internal links on a specific page, such as providing a large resource library or information directory. Because of this, Google will not automatically consider these pages spam, but they might choose to nofollow or not index some of these links.
For more information read Matts Cutts Blog Post in full.
