Google Discounting Pages Heavy on Links?

[consultant1027]

In the past, I noticed quite few sites got decent rankings for pages with multiple links with keywords in the link text. Most were not purposely SEO-built pages. A lot were like Product Listings grouped into categories or some sort of Index or Table of Content. The pages were had little to no text aside from the links and no advertising.

I've noticed recently (but imagine this happened farther in the past), that sites that SHOULD be the authority on say a certain collection within a brand, if their collection page has a very brief introductory paragraph or none at all, followed by a very good looking listing of the models within the collection, maybe 8-12 models each with the specific model title a link, their pages are ranking lower than individual model pages for several 'lesser sites'

Now obviously on-page attributes are just part of the algo, and the SERPS can be manipulated to a degree, but I'm seeing more widespread occurrences of this than isolated ones. One thing I noticed that also may contribute is that looking at the source, the page is obviously SEO optimized as the model names are also in the link title attributes and the img alt tags. This is standard good HTML practice though, but it makes the page flooded with the collection name appearing several dozen times since it is in all these different HTML attributes, and the link text for each model.

Has anyone else noticed something similar and decided to de-optimize their page and remove the target keyword from some of the tag attributes? Possibly write more content for the page?

It seems Google is heavily favoring pages with a 'balance' between text, images, and links and doesn't like tons of links. But if you are navigating an online catalog of sorts where you have to drill down to details through a hierarchy, pages with lots of links are virtually inevitable from a browsing perspective.

[dminorfmajor]

This is why reciprocal link exchange sites are no good. All of the links end up on one page usually labeled as "http://.../links". A lot of people still use them but very few swear by it. They were great in the early 2000's but as you can see, Google has learned to discount those types of pages.

[retsek]

Originally Posted by dminorfmajor

This is why reciprocal link exchange sites are no good. All of the links end up on one page usually labeled as "http://.../links". A lot of people still use them but very few swear by it. They were great in the early 2000's but as you can see, Google has learned to discount those types of pages.

The thing Google would discount would be the deer/duck hunting links in your sig originating from a site that deals with SEO and Internet marketing. Had this been a hunting/hobby forum, maybe those links would carry more weight. As it is, you're just pissing away WF's link juice.

[strategic seo services]

Google does not like link farms, aka, too many outbound links (not backlinks) on your site/pages.

[packerfan]

The theory is that PR is divided by the outbound links. So if a page has a bunch of links, there is less link juice given to each one. No one knows if there's a magic number, or whatever, but the fewer the better is what I've always heard.

There used be a baseline of 100 links per page, but this was due to limitations with google's ability to crawl more. That's since been improved. But this has nothing to do with pagerank flowing.

So you'll hear people say you can have 250 links on a page, and you can, and google can crawl those, but the link juice might be diluted.

[oldvintageguy]

Interesting idea. I'm wondering if or how this applies to directories which have a great number of links?