Remember this golden rule: too much of a good thing will only lead to something bad. Content dynamics and links are easily among the most important topics you need to know and understand. Can the number of links and content affect the ranking of your website?
Negative Effects of Too Many Links
Links are considered the lifeblood of websites and is what drives traffic to your site. The need for link building is one of the constants we must keep in mind when it comes to SEO strategies. While other performance variables remain volatile and unpredictable, and search engines adjust the weight of various elements as quickly as we change our clothes, having a sufficient number of links is often one of the top priorities for webmasters. Links are the measure of relevance of web pages and define how the website establishes its position in search engine results.
Despite the positive points of link building, going overboard in your link building campaign can actually do more harm than good. While the relevancy and positive effects of link building have stood the test of time, going over the threshold can actually seriously hurt a website’s rankings. With too many links per page, you will see your website ranking degrade. In fact, Google recommends that we maintain a decent number of links on our web pages, and the recommendation is that we do not exceed 100 links per page. Some experts believe that indexing more than a hundred links on a page can set off spam filter alarm bells and result in quality degradation of the web page in question.
This can be quite a challenge if you are running a site that promotes or sells a good number of products. Of course, the best solution is to reduce the number of links to meet the rule of less than 100. You may need to split products and catalogs and spread them across multiple pages to stay within the 100 link limit. You can use this as an opportunity to create a perfect ranking of the products you sell or promote on your website.
Negative Effects of Too Much Content
Content is king, but this doesn’t necessarily mean you can resort to a content overdose. If you try to cram all your content onto a single page, there is a high chance that search engine spiders will never index your site. Search engines don’t like websites that are cluttered with irrelevant content, and they won’t index pages that are deemed poor in terms of valuable content.
On top of this, too much content can negatively affect your website’s CTR and conversion rate. If you try to cram a lot of information and data onto a single page, your reader may find the experience too overwhelming. Web writing is a completely different animal than writing content for print materials. Visitors to your site do not “read” the content; they scan them. And if you have a mess of information and data on your web pages, consider yourself lucky if you can retain it for more than 15 seconds.