Identical internal and external nofollow links in one page

Hi all,

i have a website which i try to optimize for SEO, and i'm concerned about the amount of links on the front page and one other important page.

For instance, the front page has 170 links, which is more than the recommended amount of 100 that google advises.

The first problem is, that there are a lot of double links. For instance, a news item can be reached by clicking the news item text, the news item picture, or clicking the comments link. Should i count these 3 identical links as one link or as 3 links? How can I avoid that google spider sees this as 3 seperate links? Javascript doesn't make much sense any more, and rel=nofollow on an internal link can't be good...

Second problem, is the classic links to affiliates: I add rel=nofollow to every link, but if i analyze my page or read about this, i still see it counted as 'real' link. I rather have that google does not see those links at all.

Removing links without changing functionality or layout is not really an option.

So basically, should i try to 'fool' google by hiding those links in order to get under the recommended 100 links, or should i not worry about this?

TIA

That does sound like quite a lot. It does depend a lot on what proporation of the links are external links though. A few is OK. Having 170 external links from your home page will not be good for passing on link weight to your internal pages.



Cound them as 3 seperate links but bear in mind the link weight will be distributed as a portion - so if you had 10 links and 3 of them were to the same URL then 30% of the link weight would be passed to the one URL linked 3 times. Putting a nofollow on an internal page is something that I don't like but is not considered negative as far as I can tell but I don't think it makes any sense in this situation. I don't think there is any problem in linking to the same page with multiple links though.



rel=nofollow just means don't pass any link weight / bennefit. They still got followed and indexed. Affiliate links are something there is a bit of contravercy on. Recently I have heard that they will not cause any negative effect but I haven't seen ay hard evidence that is true yet.



It could be, surely you can change the script so that the text, picture and caption etc is all part of the same link? Its just modifying a bit of code.



You should NEVER try and fool google, thats a sure fire way to get a penalty or a ban.

Don't get hung up on exact numbers of metrics. If it makes sense for you to have 170 links - then it makes sense for you to keep them there if they genuinely serve a purpose to the user.

Thank you very much for your answer!

About 33 of the links are external (affliate) links, the rest is internal.
Of the rest of the links, i guess there are about 50 are 'double' identical links.

Some of those could be maybe made one link with some css hacks, but some other pages just need to be reachable from multiple places.

So you would recommend doing css? For instance, if i have one text link and one picture links, try to make some div class with same link or something like that?

Thanks tstolber for such a nice explanation made some doubts clear.