SEO question- outbound links

[Spaulding]

This is probably a pretty basic question-

Is there a limit on how many links you should have on a page? Does too many outbound links on a page negatively effect SE ranking?

Example- I have a site which has 100 or so outbound links to paysites sorted into various niches. Would it be better to split that page into 2 or more pages with less links?

[Halfdeck]

Is there a limit on how many links you should have on a page?

Google recommends keeping "the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100)." One reason is a page with too many links is usually not user-friendly.

Does too many outbound links on a page negatively effect SE ranking?

Technically, having too many outbounds will leak PageRank. That may not kill your ranking, but it may knock a few pages into the supplemental index if the inbound links to your domain and your internal link structure are weak. The key IMO is to maintain a good percentage of inbound to outbound. The actual number of links doesn't matter as long as a decent percentage of links on a page point to internal pages.

How does PageRank leak? On the first PageRank iteration, it doesn't; a page's PageRank is defined by links pointing to it, so you can link out to 1000 sites on that page initially it won't decrease its PageRank. But if there are any internal links pointing to that page, and if the PageRanks flowing to those internal pages decrease due to excessive outlinking, then after a few iterations, the original page ends up with less PageRank. The difference may be so slight you may not even see any dip in the TBPR.

So if you have a TBPR 6 home page, but if 99% of the links on that page point to external sites, then you have only 1% of the page's link weight flowing internally. If your site doesn't have enough deep links to internal pages from other sites, you may end up with 99% of your site in the supplemental index.

Bottom line though IMO is to base linking decisions on what keeps your surfers happy.

Example- I have a site which has 100 or so outbound links to paysites sorted into various niches. Would it be better to split that page into 2 or more pages with less links?

Unless those paysite links are ranking in the SERPs, I would nofollow them or run them through redirects on a noindexed directory. Also, having too many affiliate links per page may raise a "thin affiliate" flag, depending on your overall site profile.

[Spaulding]

Thanks for that info.