Question about going over 100 links???

My clients website(magazinesusa.com) has waaay over 100 links on each page which as I understand it, will penalize their google rankings.

Basically, I created a link for each category totalling roughly 2 dozen links plus the random miscellaneous links located throughout each page which navigates users to different portions of the website. In total, that's probably 40-50 links on any given page.

The kicker however is the magazine selection drop down box located at the top of each page. This drop down contains a link to each magazine they offer(currently only 230 titles are on the site but it will soon be in excess of 3,000!).

Normally, since I believe all of these extra links in this drop down are penalizing us by google, I would just remove it but the whole purpose of this drop down was really to provide an html link to the magazine description pages for the spiders to find because our category links are dynamic thus making it impossible for the spiders to find these description pages otherwise.

So my question is will I really be penalized for this in google's eyes and if so, would my ranking be hurt more by leaving the drop down on the site and going over the 100 link limit or removing it and losing all of the links to these content rich description pages?

Thanks in advance.

-Goalie35

IMO, Google doesn't care and therefore doesn't penalize websites which have internal links regardless of their quantity. For instance, you may have a look at www.macromedia.com which has PR10 and over 100 links per page. As long as you keep outbound links away of your site, I suppose you will do greatly.

A penalty is not likely, but having so many links will make it difficult for the pages to rank well on (focused) content. Only thing is that googlebot is said to not spider any links after #100 (or 50 ?). If that's not a problem, then having gazillions of links is fine.

The true limiti is 101k, I have site maps with 600-700 links where every links are followed by Gbot. Right now I am testing the 101k page size limit ( I have some site maps for a new site with 1300 links and 180k page size. I have reason to beleive that Gbot will crawl a very large page with out problems, if the 180k pages are ok then I will do some 260k pages etc.

I don't think <option> tags used in drop down boxes are regarded as links as they use javascript to operate rather than a normal hyperlink. So I don't think you need to worry about that. - You do have to ask your self if there is a better way to present this data (perhaps a search facility) though as no one will read through all of them!


Regarding the links I have heard of penalties with over 100 links, although I can't vouch for it. As was mentioned, as they are internal it probably isn't much of a problem.
I think Google recomends no more than 50 links per page and that is about the limit for your visitors. Any more and the site will become too busy and unusable.

Try and organise things in sub categories, this also helps give your site a theme, categories and specific sub sections which is very useful. This is likely to help the next wave of impending contextual based search engines. It also makes user browsing much more enjoyable.