SEO Question: Does The Spider Bot Follow All Links On a Web Page?
When Google spiders visit my site, do they follow all links on my page or just some of them?
Deeho Says:
As a rule, Google bot will only follow the first 100 links on each page, so for example, if you added your site link to the page of a directory which already has 150 links on it, your link will never be followed, found or counted.
When link building it’s important to find pages which have low volumes of links on them.
Google counts internal and external links, so each menu link in your navigation counts towards the 100 links limit.
The link and navigation structure is important for your websites performance and the practice of link sculpting is growing in popularity.
Each link passes link juice from that page, so it’s important not to dilute that link juice too much so you can focus it on the most important pages that you want to link to.
If Google spidered every link on every page it would open up a whole can of worms policing link juice.
It’s worth checking your pages so you know how many links each has.
Your home page will in all probability be the most authoritative and powerful page of your site, so the juice it passes to your other pages is important for those pages.
Your website is built in tiers. Tier 1 is your home page. Tier 2 is all the pages linked to from your home page. Tier 3 is pages that are only linked to from tier 2 pages and not from the home page. Your recent blog posts for example are normally tier 3 pages because your home page will link to your blog home page, which then lists the most recent posts.
When blog posts get older they drop off the bottom of your recent posts and can become tier 4 pages as there is then another click required to get to them.
This can present problems because as the rule of thumb, all pages should only ever be two clicks away from your home page.
The lower down the tiers your pages or posts are, the lower their value is in search.
The challenge is to include all your links so everything is only ever two clicks away from your home page, without exceeding the 100 links per page rule.
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