I've got a site that has a links page. I am providing a bunch of links for my users to find other sites that might aid them in finding answers to their questions. Right now I have like 80 or 90 links on the page and plan to add more as I find them. Is this bad, linking out to so many different sites on one page?
If you can, try to put that list of 90 into like three or four catagories. example: I run a pet network, and have a main links page with over 200 links in catagories ranging from dog health, to dog toy providers...
Yeah, it isn't just a huge list of links, I have 10 categories. Just wasn't sure if it was a bad thing to have, for search engines in particular. Looking like a link farm ya know.
It always helps to have your links related to your site. If you are looking to expand your links, make sure they are related. Having a logical breakdown of your links is a good idea. The SEs seem to find their way around, but it will help you link partners and may help you get some more links. And it might even be customer friendly and help make a sale. An interesting thought.
By the way....why you are doing so.....for reciprocal links?? If so...you really do not need reciprocal links...go for one way links, starts with directory submissions. Go to FREE DMOZ like directories and submit your link there. see my sign on directories.
I've put these links on my site because they contain more information than what I have. For the most part the sites I link to contain more specialized information than what I have or they are non-profit organizations or government sites. Basically to provide easy access to some other sites that my users could be interested in.
If you link to good, useful and relevant sites then you should be OK. I posted yesterday about how to make links more natural so maybe you could consider something like that.
as mentioned earlier, as long as you're linking to useful, relevant sites you have absolutely nothing to worry about: google isn't going to "punish" you for having a links page. tons of legitimate sites have them. then again, I certainly wouldn't rely on recip links from links pages to be your only real source of incoming links. that's certainly not a great plan. my personal experience? they don't help all that much in most cases. if it's not something your users are actually likely to find helpful & useful, I probably wouldn't bother on most of my sites with one.
just like what has been said I advice you to put it in categories so that it will be much easier for your users to navigate and look for the link. And IMO it is better to have 30 links as max in every page.
Yeah, all of the links that I have are relevant to my site. I don't even think I have but maybe 1 or 2 of them linking back to me. http://www.veteransresources.org/links.php That is the page in question. I read mad4's post about natural links. Mad4, would that be considered unnatural because it's a list of links with no text around them, like a description of that site? Or because the links are relevant to the site and broken down into categories, then they are natural links?
Looking at this page its clear that the links are all external and the majority of the page is links with little content (exactly as you would expect from a links page ). Links from these pages are not valued as highly as a link in the middle of an article or blog post. This won't have any effect on your site - it just means the sites you link to don't get quite as much value from the link. The bottom line is when you are building links you should try to get them on natural pages rather than links pages for maximum value.
Linking out to other relevant websites can actually make your site look like a true source for useful information to search engines. That is what linking was intended for from the beginning. You may not get top rankings for using this practice but it definitely won't hurt you in anyway.
Great. Thanks for all the replies. As long as it isn't going to hurt my ranking then I'm cool. I'm not worried about passing anything on to the other sites, except a user here and there when the user finds something that peaks their interest. Thanks again!