50,000 links on one page

Forum Moderators: open

Message Too Old, No Replies

50,000 links on one page

Way too many links

sitetruth

3:56 am on Apr 20, 2007 (gmt 0)

I came across a page on a very large and well known "authority site" with 50,000 links!

I know there's a trend to "link heavy" pages, but 50,000 links?

Does that actually do anything good for them? Or do most search engines just quit at some point?

[edited by: caveman at 4:23 pm (utc) on April 20, 2007]
[edit reason] Removed URI and specifics, per TOS [/edit]

MarketExpert

6:13 am on Apr 20, 2007 (gmt 0)

I too am very interested in this answer.

sitetruth

4:47 pm on Apr 20, 2007 (gmt 0)

We aren't allowed to give the URL, but that site has several such pages; every 50,000 links they start a new page, and it takes four such pages, to link to (presumably) every page they have. The pages are all links; there's not even any content associated with each link other than the URL as text.

These pages are part of a "category" system, so there's a "natural" way to reach those pages other than the giant link pages.. Clearly the giant link pages are for search engine use. Do the major search engines follow all those links? Or do they hit a limit and stop reading them, assuming that any page like that has to be link spam?

pageoneresults

5:48 pm on Apr 20, 2007 (gmt 0)

I'd take a look at the cached versions of those pages and see if the entire page is getting indexed. 50,000 links is way too many links to have on one page. Google even states in their webmaster guidelines to keep links on a page to fewer than 100.

Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

Its someone's uninformed attempt at getting pages spidered. There are better ways to do this.

sitetruth

9:17 pm on Apr 20, 2007 (gmt 0)

OK, then, given that Google recommends no more than 100, we'll stop looking in our rating system spider after 1000 links or so. There are a few major sites with more than 100 useful links on a page, but beyond 1000, it just has to be a link farm or something aimed at search engines.

caveman

1:00 am on Apr 21, 2007 (gmt 0)

Could be related to some sort of internal record keeping or tracking. Sites have done stupid things before where they thought pages were not public ... but that the spiders found the pages, which makes the pages public.

As POR says, there's a better way to do it, if it's for the SE's. But FWIW, I know with certainty that the SE's follow links WAY beyond 100 per page. ;-)

netchicken1

1:48 am on Apr 21, 2007 (gmt 0)

Maybe its good that google limits itself to 100 or so.

Imagine the server load if google started spidering all 50,000 links at once, and then with 4 more pages.

caveman

2:29 am on Apr 21, 2007 (gmt 0)

That can control that.

Don't forget, and I'm only paraphrasing here, that they've said they will 'use any reasonable means' in their quest to find and categorize the information on the Web. Anyone think they'll ignore links to pages just because they exceed 100 links? Pfhh.

Think about it. Why do they *really* want Webmasters to limit the number of links per page? ;-)