How many links to my internal pages can I place on my home page? I have a site that have more than 100 links (to its internal pages) on the home page, should I reduce the number of links (to its internal pages) on home page or is it OK? Any suggestions or advice. Thanks in Advance
the answer is going to depend on what you ultimately want to do with your site. why are there 100 links? are you hoping they will improve your search engine rankings? (they wont) or are they really necessary or navigation?
Build the homepage for the user not the search engine. 100 links is not to many if it is user friendly. Internal linking only helps a little. External linking accountsfor at least 65% of ranking in serp. Think backlinking for serp and internal and content for the visitor.
I agree, if they are just spammy links in a footer you should probably avoid them. However, if they are necessary for navigation on a large site it won't hurt you. I have a site that has over 300 links from the home page to the next level of navigation. It doesn't hurt the site's SERPs. It ranks #1 for it's main keyword and also many of the internal pages rank well for their main keywords too.
Well first off, the home page should be the fastest loading page on your site and be very easy to navigate through, so having 100 links on there is definately a bad way to start. I'd definately limit the number of links to the bare essentials to make ti easier on the search engines as well as your users. What site is this, anyway? (Please, do NOT PM me the link - post it here.)
Internal linking is good practice, but 100 is quite more amount, you may have internal links, and place relevant internal links in content of website, rather than putting it in line of footer or navigation bar. By placing internal link with proper anchor in content will definately helps you.
Just so you know, if it's an <a href=""></a> tag pair, I count it as a link. Where it goes is what I use to determine its nature (to another page = internal; to another site = external). Bear that in mind. And yes, this DOES include menus and footer links.
here is one good solution for you if you wanna add your links only for search engine then you can use sitemap.xml and add it on your website home page you can also add on google webmaster tool bar and update regularly.
Close but not quite. Put the sitemap PAGE on your site, but submit the XML file to the search engines. Remember, Joe Sixpack and Grandma Edith have absolutely NO clue what a sitemap.xml file is - they click on the link, they'll want to see a page, not XML code.
Dan I already mention there this technique is for only search engine not for visitors. In that way we can promote our all the pages in quick section.
And you should know me by now - I build sites for people, not search engines. In this case, having the link to the sitemap.xml file will be pointless because if you have a robots.txt file with the autodiscovery directive included, it'll FIND the sitemap before it even reads a single line of code from ANY of your pages.
Dan and Aryans you both are right at your own views, But the main thing is, that Google may find internal links from any page and also from site map. you should have very strong internal linking on each and every page, which helps your visitor as well as se's too. There are website for which is there is no any sitemap page nor submited xml in Google webmaster tools, Though their all pages are getting indexed because of proper internal linking. one thing for sure dan has rightly said, "your website is limited to your visitor not for the se" and se likes these kind of websites
ok, thanks for all the comments. I think i should keep these links on home page as they are, so visitor of my site can easily navigate from one page to another.
One thing to think about when linking from the home page is anchor text. The vast majority of home pages receive most incoming links so tend to be the highest PR page of a site. Since the home page gets most links it tends to be the easiest page to get your hardest SERPs ranked for. So if your smart you'll use your home page to target your hardest SERP(s). Anchor text of links from a page is considered more important in ranking terms than standard body text, the same way a H1 header should ideally cover a pages main SERP, a lot of the anchor text on a page should also cover the main and related SERPs for that page. Not saying every link has to support a pages SERP, just keep it in mind. If you add 100 links from your home page it's highly unlikely to result in the anchor text of those links supporting that pages main SERP and so could be damaging your chances of gaining your hardest SERPs. We then have to take into account internal pages, a poster above said- "internal linking only helps a little. External linking accounts for at least 65% of ranking in serp" This is just not true, internal linking is no different to incoming links, in fact with an old site with stable aged links internal linking is faster at getting better SERPs than gaining new incoming links. Not going to go into great detail here, but an internal link passes full link benefit practically overnight while a new incoming link from an external source takes at least 9 months to pass full SEO benefit "Google Sandbox effect). Yes 99.99% of PR within a site is from external sources, but once a page gains PR it 'owns' that PR (difficult to explain this). If your home page is PR6, then PR wise there is no difference between linking from your home page to an internal page as it would be gaining a new PR6 link from a similar external page. In both examples the linked to page gains a PR6 link. Ignoring the faster passing of SEO benefit from internal linking, both links pass the same amount of PR/link benefit (eventually, assuming everything is equal). The benefit of incoming links over internal links, is new incoming links adds PR to the page/site. In the PR6 home page link example you are using PR/link benefit the site already has. With a new PR6 link from an external source you are gaining new PR which through internal linking will increase the PR/link benefit of every page of the site. That is so hard to explain, but hope I've got it across successfully David Law