: Web page has well over 100 anchor tags - how to improve SEO without taking anchors out? I have a website where the main menu has 10 level 1 items and each has roughly 10 level 2 items

@Megan663

There is no reason to follow the advice to keep a low number of links per page. Here is a visualization of the number of links on the homepages of top 98 webpages. Very few have less than 100, and many have 500 or more. If the top websites don't limit the number of links, then you don't have to either. Google's "100 links per page" advice is very old. The web has changed a lot since they started saying that in 1999. From an SEO standpoint, having lots of links on every page can really help instead of hurt, especially if those links are usable.

Edit: Google removed the "100 links per page" from the webmaster guidelines some time ago. Matt Cutts just released a video where he says that the limits for page size and number of links per page are much higher than they used to be.

On the flip side, the biggest downside of a multi-level menu is that it pushes the majority of your Pagerank to the pages that are in the menu. Since those pages are linked on every page, pages that aren't in the menu can have a hard time competing. If your menu covers all your important pages, then there is little reason to change anything. But if you have important pages that aren't in your main menu and you are having trouble ranking then you might want to consider revamping your main menu.

One technological solution to your main menu would be to load all the level 2 items through an AJAX call. Have javascript trigger on mousover of any of the level 1 items that loads the links from another file, inserts them into the menu system, and then shows them. Google will assign much less pagerank through these 2nd level links because it has to crawl an extra page to get to them.

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@Angela700

Just think about usability.


Is your website well structured?
Is all parts of your website easily accessible?
Is page hierarchy logical and user friendly?
Do you unnecessarily sitewide link to the same pages of your site?
Does your site contain over excessive links on the page?
Are your anchors descriptive for visitors and not for SEO?


Tick all the right boxes for providing great value for your website visitors and that's more than half the job done right there.

PageRank has to flow naturally, this is the purpose of it. I really wouldn't worry about it being distributed via 100 links of your website providing those links serve value to your visitors.

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