Google’s Matt Cutts: We Dropped The 100 Links Per Page Guideline But We May Take Action If It Is Too Spammy

Google’s Matt Cutts posted a video explaining why Google no longer has that 100-links-per-page Webmaster guideline. In fact, the guideline was dropped well before 2008, but SEOs and webmasters still think having over 100 links on a page is something that may lead to a penalty. The truth is: no, it won’t. Sites like Techmeme […]

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google-links-featuredGoogle’s Matt Cutts posted a video explaining why Google no longer has that 100-links-per-page Webmaster guideline.

In fact, the guideline was dropped well before 2008, but SEOs and webmasters still think having over 100 links on a page is something that may lead to a penalty.

The truth is: no, it won’t. Sites like Techmeme likely has thousands of links on their home page, and they are not penalized by Google.

That being said, Google said if a site looks to be spammy and has way too many links on a single page — Google reserves the right to take action on the site.

Matt also explained that your PageRank is divided by the number of links on a page. So if page A links to page B, C and D, that PageRank is split into three. If you have hundreds of links, it is divided by hundreds, and so forth.

Here is Matt’s video:

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About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a technologist and a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics.

In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the "US Search Personality Of The Year," you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O'Clock.

Barry can be followed on X here and you can learn more about Barry Schwartz over here or on his personal site.

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