Hi DP members, I am creating a big website, with more than probably 1000 links on the homepage (dropdowns pure CSS). I think at the end the homepage will become very big. What is the recommended size of homepage and do you think that size really matters for SEO? Kind regards Kal
Well the size doesnt matter in SEO but it will matter to your users when they open the site it will take a lot of time and that wont do any good to you that could be irritating at times I am telling from my experience. And also having too many links on home and as many as 1000 is really not good as an SEO point of view as you are transferring all your links juice to other sites and pages. Try to limit the no. of links on your home page so that it doesn't appear as a link farm to search engines and your users also find it useful.
The size of your home page and number of links on it is definitely a matter for SEO. But you must know when. 1. If the page size is large, due to existance of large images or media files, it's not a matter for search engines. If the amount of text is too high, only then it will matter. 2. If your server is fast enough, and if the media files on your home page loads really fast, it'll not create any problem probably. 3. If the images on home page is large in size because of it's high dimension, Google will not ignore it. Because, Google tags your large dimension images as 'Extra Large Image' on Google image search and treats those images specially, instead of avoiding them. 1. Number of links is great factor when it's more than some 200 or 300. Be sure, Search Engines will never assume your site as link farm, as most of these links are pointing to webpages, which are on same domain (as per my guess). Still search engines will refuse to follow most of those links, because they are large in number. 2. Google will probably look for a suitable sitemap, when the number of links is exceeding limits. So you must have it. 3. The page rank of your homepage will be affected, if the number of links on it is some 1000. According to a blind assumption, you need atleast 10,000 valuable backlinks to your home page to keep your PR rising or atleast stable.
Having 1000 links on your home page is going to absolutely suck from an SEO perspective IMO. You should rethink the information architecture of your site... How you decide to interlink your pages has HUGE affects on your site from an SEO perspective. Your home page will accumulate the most inbound links over time. It will end up being the highest PR page on your site. With 1000 links on your home page, you will be passing those 1000 pages almost NO SEO benefit. It's MUCH better to have many fewer links to the most important pages on your home page (I generally try to keep it capped at 50-75 links MAX, less if possible). Then let those pages linked to from the home page take care of linking out to lesser important pages... and so on down to the least imporant pages on the site. I am a BIG fan of theme pyramids (See Brett Tabke's post on the thread - 4th down in red/blue) for big sites. It not only does a great job of funneling link juice / page rank throughout the site, but also does a great job of controlling the "flow of relevance" around your site. And everyone knows Google is BIG on relevance. I have seen HUGE wins by going to theme pyramids on larger sites.
I suggest you to change your planning there. Always keep the links on any page to less than 100 Please refer google webmaster guidelines http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769 Check on "design and content" section for If you choose to give 1k links on your main page itself, then most probably your site will be marked as link farm and it won't deliver any SEO value to the links that you have on that page instead it might lead to penalty too. So, be wise before launching this big website.
In as much as possible, try to follow the rule of seven. No more than seven links per level, which would put seven links on the home page. If you only have 1000 pages, then everything could be within 3 clicks of the home page. 7*7=49*7=343*7=2401 This usually requires a great deal of thought on the information architecture side of things, as canonical alluded to.
Google will stop crawling links at some point over 100. You will lose a lot of PR even with no follow links. I can't help to wonder why you don't set up a directory. That's what they are for.
Actually, this is no longer true. 6-8 yrs ago Google might have stopped at the 100th link on a page. But they will likely crawl all 1000 links on the home page now days. They used to also have a 100k limit on the amount of content they would index for a URL. But that too is also outdated. They crawl and index pages that are 5-10 times that big now with no problem. Regardless of whether they "can" index more than 100 links or more than 100k of content per URL... It is still a VERY bad idea to have that many links on a single page.
Thanks Mate! I agree with you! I don't see why they wont be able to crawl more than 100 link on homepage - all links are relevant, all articles are relevant and link to another relevant article. I am sorry, but I do not agree with people that are saying that It is not possible - look at top 10 results and all results for travel/tourism websites have at least 200 links from homepage.
You are correct that Google will crawl more than 100 links on a page. But the crawler will stop crawling at some point. I believe that it's somewhere between 200-300 links. But I'm open to hearing more current information.