Well, I think most of you have realized by now that I am influenced by the legendary Bob Dylan and his Blowin’ In The Wind ( How many roads must a man walk down ) – but the content is inspired by Matt Cutts. Yes, in one of his recent post Matt addressed the question that is often asked by webmasters, SEOs and link builders – how many outbound links should you have on one page ?

Under Content and design guidelines provided in Google Webmaster Help, they clearly state a page should have no more than 100 links from it. Matt explained that originally Google bot had the capacity to index only 100 KB of a web page so a page with too many links always had the risk of not getting indexed completely. However, Googlebot is much more efficient now and can index lot more than 100 KB – so this would probably not be a point of concern now.

The main point of concern with having too many links on one page is from the user experience perspective. It has been observed that users typically do not like link heavy pages except for few cases (e.g, web directories ). As Google has always advocated making web pages for users they do stand for the fact that web page should not have too many outbound links.

In addition, for those link builders who hunt for links to boost their PR Matt has also clarified that when a page links to too many website the PR gets distributed among all of them. So even if a high PR page links to too many websites it would be able to pass only a minuscule PR value to each of them.

Google would however not be treating all pages with 100 or more links as spam. They understand that there might be perfectly justifiable reasons for having a page with more than 100 links. If the links are hidden or keyword stuffed they might however trigger the spam filter.
Typically if you have too many links ( more than 100 ) on a page Google would either not follow or not index all of them thereby making them useless.

As I have always suggested to my clients and through my blog posts in many occasion, it is is good to give links to other websites but link out only when you think you can justify it as a regular visitor. Links for the sake of linking or getting link backs are not really worth it, link only when you think that the link is going to benefit your visitors, that way not only are you likely to keep Google happy but probably add value to your visitor’s surfing experience.