Too many links?

[mowax]

I recently found out about google’s guideline stating that each page should have fewer than 100 links. I have since got the number of links of my home page down from 148 to 120, but I’m finding that all the blocks in Prestashop add so many links that you almost can’t add any of your own without falling outside of the guidelines. And after snooping around other forum members’ websites, I can see that everyone else is also falling outside the guidelines.

I know that a lot of the links in prestashop are good for SEO, but there are a lot that I am thinking about removing. There are too many in the ‘featured products’ block for instance.

Do people pay much attention to this guideline or not? Apparantly the search engines do.

Please post any thoughts or findings on this subject to determine it is worth adhering to this guideline.

Regards

[CataNic]

Google recommend a maximum of 100 links per page. It's better to follow it's rules if you want to have good results in SERPs. More than 100 links per page are difficult to understand for users, too.

[Trip]

O.k. I don't want to question google's guidelines but I think they're able to determine the difference between navigation links and product links. For shop pages it enhances the user experience to have all the legal issues clarified, to see new products and so on. I would not recommend to show 100 products on the first with keywords stuffed urls that they become unreadable but as you can see here http://www.nickbilton.com/98/ or look at for example at wikipedia many links do not necessarily "punish" your rankings.
To quote Matt Cutts "... we can handle a lot of common web design idioms" and I assume it is quite easy for google to determine that it es dealing with an ecommerce site and understands the common patterns in the site structure.
From my experience products from the new products tab are selling good. Should I take it away and have less conversations because I want to reduce links?
Read on this article from Matt Cutts
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-many-links-per-page/

I read a lot from him already and one credo is always make your website that way that it is a good user experience or even
in the quality guidelines they say "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
If you can answer this with yes you can not do so much wrong.

[nichita2008]

The links on the big sites are OK because these sites have a lot of powerful IBL's. The links juice is able to flow on the internal pages through menu. I suppose you don't have a huge site, with many IBL's.

I've tested in the past a website with very low results / slow indexed. After few months of tests my conclusion was these links (about 180-190) was a problem.

[Trip]

Yes, nichita, when you have no reputation and start from the scratch and think you're smart when you use a navigation with 200 spammy links like
www.wurst.com/buy-trousers-cheap/
www.wurst.com/buy-trousers-cheap-for-men/
you'll surely have a slow start or probably never gonna make it to the top.
I think Matt Cutts already clarified that. Google loves content because it is there capital. If you have unique content it will not
deny to index. To get in good positions it takes time because you need to get good reputation, update you content and so on and so on. I just question that it depends on if I have 100 or 140 links on my homepage. There are I think about 200 factors in the google algo to determine the value of the content and instead of thinking how can I reduce the links you should think of how do I get a good user experience and provide good content. I am not the super SEO expert but I made a lot of tests and surprise - I have sites running with 2000 users per day which are purely running on duplicate content. My experience is, the times are over where SEO was as simple as following a cooking recipe like put 15 % of the keywords here and title tags in the link like that and voila, I am on top. These good practises are still valid but to the complexity of the SE-algos and the growing number of pages you need a little bit more to come in good positions - espacially time and creativity.

There are some structural problems in PS concerning SEO, tomerg3 and others provided useful fixes to get that under control and if you think reducing the links on your page will do the trick you're free to do so. I for myself might be blinded as I can't even find the 100 links passage in the guidelines http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769 any more.
Regards, trip