Short answer for this question would be ‘NO’. But that doesn’t mean having more than hundred links per page is a good idea. So long answer is going to be ‘YES’. Let’s discus some bad effects of having more than 100 links per page.
Google has answered this question previously and they have confirmed it’ll not have direct effect on your SEO. But at the same time they talked about bad user experience that may be a result of unnecessary numbers of links. However Google have removed this rule from its technical guidelines page as well.
So if you have more than 100 links per page and all pages of your site are well indexed, you’re at the safe site. But if you’re struggling to get indexed, you should try to keep your links per page under 100. Because Google still have some weight on this one. They may consider your page as spam or link farm if you have unnecessary numbers of links on a page. Although 100 link rule is no longer valid in SEO, ‘spam’ and ‘link farm’ are still in Google’s quality guidelines and can result in a ban.
And Google says that, they might not follow all URLs on a page if page has more than 100 links on it. I can’t see the point of having more than 100 links if you already know that Google won’t follow every URL. So my recommendation is try to limit links on your page to 100. Forget what Google says about this issue and think about user experience. Include only related links to the user’s query. It’ll make user’s navigation though your site easy and he or she will stay longer on your site.
At the same time, I would like to mention that if there’s no choice but to have more than hundred links on your page, don’t hesitate do it. But Google is smart. It’ll know when there is spam links or link farms. And if your site is new and has only 30-40 unique articles or less, there’s no way you can exceed this limit.
I see this problem with commercial themes and templates these days; they have lots of repeated links. Some links are repeated 6-8 times per page. Developers only focus on fancy design and end up displaying several hundred links per page when there’s only 30 or 40 unique articles on entire site. So be careful about this and tune your theme if it’s repeating links unnecessarily. You can review your on-page SEO including link count at SEOCentro for free.
And here’s a video of Google’s Mat Cutts talking about it.
[youtube id=”l6g5hoBYlf0″ width=”520″ height=”302″]
