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Since 2008 we've known Google stopped their 100 links per page limit. Last year, Matt Cutts posted a video answer on that topic as well.
While Google has said they don't have a 100 link limit anymore, they never really said if there was a limit or not.
Google's John Mueller said in a Google Webmaster Help thread that there is no limit. He wrote:
There's no limit to the number of links on your pages, so that wouldn't be affecting how your site shows up in search results.
Of course, links on your page can hurt you if you are doing something spammy. Matt described this in his video last year as well.
But now we know there is no real limit in the number of links per page.
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.
Comments:
Michael Martinez
04/28/2014 02:26 pm
Maybe people should think in terms of "number of useful links".
Scott
04/28/2014 02:53 pm
Am I reading too much into it or is this the end of backlinks having any benefit in SEO?
Nathan Grimm
04/28/2014 03:00 pm
or "amount of total usefulness" on a page.
Vanessa Fox
04/28/2014 03:26 pm
You're reading too much into it. This has been true since the days when I worked there.
Michael Ramsey
04/28/2014 03:26 pm
I've certainly seen sites get what appeared to be an over-optimization penalty for having way too many links. It's not a technical limit, sure, but can still hurt. Make sure your navigation and general linking practices are actually useful for users and generally makes sense. No one wants to use a 4+ tier nav with hundreds or thousands of links.
wertwert
04/28/2014 06:00 pm
Nope... Google is saying there is no "Too Many Links" penalty... There is still a practical limit. In the past google would only index keywords and process links in the first 256KB of a webpage's HTML source. This is how they original set the 200 links per page limit in the webmaster guidelines. They have increased that amount in recent years but at some point there are only so many links they are going to process on a single page. So even though a page might have 5000 Links they wont process most of them.
wertwert
04/28/2014 06:11 pm
I don't believe in the "over-optimization penalty" in terms of on-page SEO. I have tried and tried so many people's ideas on what causes an over-optimization penalty in content and it just doesn't exist. Until someone has some reproducible empirical data on that I remain very skeptical that it even exists. I do completely agree with your second paragraph.
Michael Ramsey
04/28/2014 06:22 pm
I can say I've seen it personally 4 times that I can remember off the top of my head. Each case was egregiously large navigation. The worst was over 6000 links, the smallest I think was about 300-350. In each case, I removed or significantly cut down the giant drop down navigation and within a couple weeks ranks and traffic started climbing nicely.
wertwert
04/28/2014 06:28 pm
My average page has 500+ links on it because of amazon-like category navigation. I rank on page 1 for tens of thousands of good keywords... I concur that there can be issues with links and navigation like content duplication, too many layers of depth, diluted PR, etc... all I am saying is that those things aren't "over optimization penalties" in fact they are better described as poorly optimized or under-optimized.
Michael Ramsey
04/28/2014 07:20 pm
Ah well yeah, totally agree. Exactly what is an "OOP" (if anything) and what is just generally poor optimization is a guessing game. It's not like you hit a certain number of links and start not ranking. That's why I qualified with "appeared to be" as the improvement after changing was very significant. I've certainly got clients with large navigation that rank great (top 5 for hundreds of targeted terms) as well.
Seth Jones
04/30/2014 06:54 am
I'm looking forward for positive effects on News and eCommerce Sites.