If you are a growing small to medium-sized local business, you know that inbound links to your website make for
good local SEO; they are important to getting high Google rankings. Search engines reward links from what it calls “authoritative” sites to your pages. But too many links is considered “spam” and is punished with lower rankings. How much is too much of a good thing?
Link Building By the Numbers
The guideline that has been around seemingly forever is this: no more than 100 links on a single page. That is still a good overall guideline but it is only a rough parameter. Various webmaster groups are now merely suggesting you use a “reasonable number” of links. Even the leader of Google’s “Webspam” team doesn’t give an exact amount.
In a recent industry-focused webcast, Matt Cutts points out that several years ago Google bots would truncate links exceeding 100 per 101K of information –basically one link per kilobyte. All along, he says, that was meant to be a rough number. The truth is that 105 links on a page of that length will not tip the scales and send a page into the Seven Circles.
New aggregators and other tools have kept pace with the richer content and larger files used today. They have taken the kinks out of the process so there is no more defined link limit.
Link Building - Keep it User Friendly
What is more important to local SEO these days is the quality of the content and the web design. For you, the business owner, this means writing pages that have meaning and are long enough to satisfy Google (at least 400 words). It is also important to build links to the highest-quality sources you can find. And it means avoiding at all costs the appearance of spam – paragraph after paragraph of blue underscored words.
These days, if it looks “funny” to your human readers, it will be questionable to the robots. How do you know for sure? A local SEO company with a solid track record of success is your best guide to the link-building game.