November 1, 2008 by Matt Thomas
It’s a popular belief amongst SEOs and developers that, if you were to include more than 100 links on a single page, the search engine would go completely crazy and refuse point blank to crawl it, quailing at the sheer complexity. I know people, quite intelligent people, that swear blind that this is true. It isn’t.
The real reason that you shouldn’t include anything like that many links on a single page is that it will make that page a real pain to actually use. For a moment, Just imagine a page that actually had 100 links, how unwieldy would that be? You’re already clicking the ‘back’ button in your mind, aren’t you?
The 100 links myth emerged courtesy of Google’s webmaster guidelines, which recommend keeping it below 100 just out of common sense.
The good news is that, if you have some good reason to include more than the magic number of links on your page (I can’t think of one), you should feel free to go ahead without fearing that you will confuse Google. However, I can only advise you to think very carefully about your users’ sanity before you do so.
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