In a video on Google Webmaster, Matt Cutts recently answered a question on how many links a page should have and whether there was any limit attached to it.
As per Matt Cutts, the earlier guidelines implied that if a page was about 100k or 101K in length it might have 100 links in it and so it was believed that anything beyond this will be considered as spammy and irrelevant. Marketers took note of this fact and started taking advantage of this rule and would ensure that the number of links was kept lower than 102. However this is not the case anymore, as Google now gives more emphasis on the overall content that appears on a site and how users benefit from this content than to the number of links appearing on a page.
Some guidelines provided by Matt Cutts are as follows:
1. The page should not have links on it that are too many in number and look spammy. Spammy links are those that are acquired by unethical means or using Black Hat SEO. These include link farms, hidden links, Sybil attacks and spam blogs. If Google finds such links on a page then it might take action and punish the sites and also stop indexing them altogether.
2. Google keeps updating its search and ranking algorithm and as per the latest update made by Google it does not make sense to have more links on a page than it requires since the more links a gage will have, the lesser page rank it will receive from Google.
3. However the above rule does not mean that all pages that have more links will be penalized. Exceptions have been made to this rule for sites that have rich & relevant content that is updated on a regular basis, are user friendly and have material substance in them that encourages visitors to keep coming back to the site. For such sites the number of links appearing on a page can be higher.
4. Exception is also made for those websites that have a significant amount of multimedia content on them. Such web pages are not penalized because additional links are a mainstay for such websites as they attract visitors that have a need and interest to view and download content from such websites. Also with advanced technology now available with Google, more data can be processed quickly and so having a high number of links on a page is not a problem anymore.
As a thumb rule marketers can assume that link building and that too using unethical means is not the correct way to improve search engine rankings. The focus of a marketer rather should be on a content driven SEO approach that focuses more on the behavior and interest pattern of a user and what the user likes/ dislikes or shares with others.