Pages with excessive link

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

• 
  Alan Bleiweiss: Nine hundred links? From navigation? There is a major problem with this for several reasons. I will cover just a couple of the most important issues in this answer. 1. Nine hundred links, is insane from a human usability perspective. So if the links are visible, or revealed in a drill down process, you are killing usability. Most people would be so overwhelmed, as to get dizzy. Any time humans become overwhelmed by something you present them, it is a red flag that you are overwhelming search engines. In this case, crawl efficiency, and topical focus. 2. If you keep them hidden from users and they are just there in a way that you only display a sub set of them based on section or page relevance, that is an insane waste of code bloat and still forces search crawl inefficiency and topical understanding.
• 
  Alan Bleiweiss: I also just looked at the sample page you linked to. Within the code, that page contains around 400 links. Not sure which pages show up with 900, however even 400 is too many - it`s just too many choices for site visitors to have to sit and scroll through. How many people who come to the site are going to sit there, and open up every link accordion, such as "Hot Tub Brands", then take the time to hover over each brand, to read through all the individual brand`s series or models, and click through from those? If I don`t know exactly which brand, or within a brand, which series or model I want, based on having no clue as to what the features or price of any of those are, there`s no way on earth that navigation is helpful. And I can assure you, that`s how most site visitors are. So think of search engine crawlers and algorithms, having to figure everything out from that volume of links and sub-links and sub-sub-links. And even if you don`t think it matters to SEO, realize it`s toxic to usability, so for that reason alone, it`s harmful.