Some SEO sites are telling me that I have too many links on my site. (about 150). Do search engines really care about this in this day and age? I mean, 100 seems a bit LOW if anything.
Yes - SEs do care. Your losing to much link juice if you have over a 100 links on your site. Just depends if you are trying to move up in the SERPs. If you are - at least put the rel=nofollow in your anchor tags.
You should not have too many links on each page. From what I heave heard its more like 50 - 75 links per page. But lets take a look at the BIG picture. Lets say you have 1,000 outbound links. But you have 10,000 in bound links. I dont see a problem with that. Its when you have more outbound then inbound, that is when the problem starts. As an example, go look at wikipedia. On each article there might be 10 - 50 outbound links to sources of information. But that same article might have 100,000 inbound links. So wikipedia has more inbound then outbound and ranks at the top of google all the time.
I agree that you should try to stay under 50 - 75 links (both internal and external links) per page. Each page has only so much PR to send to other pages it links to. If you have too many links on a page you are spreading that internal PR too widely and none of those pages would get enough to rank well. Think of how many important pages you have that you actually want ranked well. Ideally your site would have some type of pyramid internal link scheme.
It also depends how many pages/how much content is on your site. If you only have one page, for example... that's a bit much. If you have 250 pages... it's not that many. You see what I'm getting at?
I have a site that has over 300 links on the home page. The next level pages consist of hundreds of links too. The site ranks #1 for the major keyword in it's niche. Most of the next level pages (300 of them) are in the top 10 for their terms. In addition, the site has a lot of outgoing links to other sites in the niche. It's not about the number of links you have on a page. It's about the number of links coming into your site and your on page SEO. Get those two things right and you don't have to worry about much more.
It really depends on how much links come into your page and how many of those links are internal links. If you have 150 outbound links, that is bad. If you have 20 outbound links and 130 leading to other parts of your site that is perfectly fair game. Basically the more popular you are, the less Google cares about how many links you are sticking on each page (unless you literally turn it into a link farm, etc.). So if your site is popular, then don't worry. If you are just starting out, cut some links out.
There is no magic number of links going out. Link to what makes sense to your visitors. How can you have 150 outgoing links from a small site if you are not running a directory? Think about the purpose in your linking structure. If you are just dumping links out to all kinds of different sites then it will probably confuse the SE's as to what your site is really about. And that is a bad thing.
@Stu-- Don't just ask and wait for answer. Take action. Use Google and search for the answer yourself.
if those links are internal you could decrease their number and optimize them in terms of keywords to concentrate the internal link juice on the keywords you are promoting for, that sometimes makes sense
Having too many links means you're spamming. If you are spamming then you might get banned by google.
This makes no sense at all man. The worst that can happen is that google bot won't read the page code exceding 100Kb (that is if you have thousands of links there), but it won't ban you. Especially it won't ban you for many internal links, and the topic starter is talking about those.
What is the purpose of these links? If they are recipricol links maybe look at other more benificial link building methods such as contextual link building.
no they like links but dont like too many links with same anchor text that seems to be a keyword or a keywd.phrase