Recommended to keep links to fewer than 100?

I've read from Google Webmaster Guideline that it's recommended to keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

Some questions:

1) What will happen if the number of links are more than the recommended amount?

2) Let's say I have 150 links, will it help if i were to use rel="nofollow" for 50-60 of them?

 

Is this guideline for their crawlers or for users who visit our sites?

 

It's difficult to imagine an article on the site, where you put ~100 links in natural way... I think "100" is not the number...

 

Anyone has experience with this?

What about those sites with tag cloud? Most of them have more than 100 links when tag cloud is included e.g. http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/

 

Those are guidelines.. Google may or may not have algorithms to devalue pages that have more than 100 links. Whenever you have doubts, just think of users experience: Will the links (regardless of numbers) benefit the users?

 

Thank you for replying. I'm sure that the links on my site benefit the users. Just that I do not know how Google see them. And because it's a pretty big project, i just wanna confirm that nothing will go wrong or even get my site removed from their search engine as a penalty.

Meanwhile, I've emailed google hoping to get a clearer explanation/answer from them.

 

100 is just an ideal number for usability really, the more you have the less weight that will get passed on to those 100 links.

I've seen alot of 200+ link pages ranking really well. Also nearly every DP page has over 100, 4 sig links and 1 recent blog x 20 posts per page equals 100 external links just from that. Counting internal links it can be around 400 per page.

 

You could have 1,000 links, if you use the ref="nofollow" tag they won't even see one on the page. You can have a large link page with this method and not have it effect your SERPs or PR bleed.

 

I think number of links is not an issue as long as those links are relevant. I also think that google can determined if the links is a waste or useful.

 

I think too that it is different if the links point internal or external. Your example shows flikr pointing internally.

 

I've seen directories which have high PR and SERP which had probably colse to or more than 100 links.