Do You Follow The 100 Links Guideline When Designing Your Website?

Webmasters should always follow Google's webmaster guidelines if they want their sites to rank well in the search engines. Most guidelines are simple and natural to understand. So there should be no issue following these guidelines.

In essence, links must be natural to follow, and content must be original. The search bots have evolved and they should now be able to index non-static text links but to be on the safe side, always try to use static text links whenever possible to ensure that your web pages are found and indexed by the crawlers. If you read Google's webmaster guidelines, you will notice that much of the guidelines are based on links. What does that mean?

1) Neat navigational structure - webmasters should ensure that the sites have a neat navigation menu. The menu is usually placed right at the top of the site, or in a sidebar. Tree navigation using Javascript is acceptable. You must have seen this when browsing sites on the Internet. You click on a link, and then a whole set of links appear in a drop down format. This structure is also commonly known as the parent-child format. You have parent categories, followed by child categories. Google search engines like Google have been known to be smart enough to learn about the organizational structure of the site based on such tree structures.

2) Using sitemaps. - Sitemaps have often been neglected by webmasters. Sitemaps are web pages that contain nothing but links to internal web pages. This will help search spiders locate all the content quickly without having to crawl deep into the site. Traditionally, sitemaps used to be maintained manually. In other words, webmasters have the unenviable task of updating the links whenever they change. Today, most content management systems provide automated sitemaps. You just need to publish new content and the sitemaps will be updated automatically.

3) Limit links to 100 per page. - An important webmaster guideline is to limit links on a single page to not more than 100. Google search engines are very sensitive to links. And if you create web pages containing more than 100 links, your search rankings may be penalized as your web site may be mistaken as a link farm. Link farms are created specifically to manipulate search engine rankings and they are NOT sound webmaster practices. So avoid adding more than 100 links in a single web page. You should also limit each sitemap on your site to 100 links or less. If you have more links, create multiple sitemaps (e.g. page 1, page 2, etc).

Keep your link count small and manageable on each web page. Your web traffics will find it easier to navigate the site and search engines will appreciate the effort and reward you with higher search rankings.

Webpage should comply with W3C requirements and webmaster guidelines. Tat is why we encourage limiting 100 links per webpage and we use sitemap for our websites. We also recommend justhost web hosting - the wordpress blog hosting from justhost is easy to use and cheap in price.