Matt Cutts: Google No Longer Has 100 Links Per Page Guideline

When content developers try to follow SEO guidelines too closely, they lose sight of the real goal, which is to create content for users, not search engines. Google's Matt Cutts has relieved many webmasters from the confusion over how many links are allowed on a web page. Many content creators were convinced the limit was 100 links per page, but Google has not used that guideline since pre-2008. Websites, in other words will not get punished by Google's algorithm if they exceed 100 links per page. Cutts says that as long as links don't appear to be spammy then the page is okay. Cutts did say, however, if a site looks spammy with too many links on one page, Google may take action. Cutts says that at one time 100k or more web pages were not even indexed in Google. The search engine used to calculate 1 link per kilobyte as reasonable, resulting in the rough technical guideline of 100 links per page. But it was not a strict guideline; although many webmasters interpreted it as meaning 101 links were too many and could draw a penalty. Since web pages have grown with more rich media and aggregators that generate more links, Google has since removed the guideline. There may still be a limit on file sizes, says Cutts, but it's much larger than in the past. He also emphasizes that the number of links that can be processed on a page is much more now. If your site has a huge number of links, the amount of PageRank that flows out from each link can be limited. It's now common for a page to have up to 400 links without getting penalized as long as the page is long with a substantial amount of content.