Today I’ve readed the Webmaster Guidelines, in the “Design and content guidelines” section Google recommends to keep a resonable number of links in the page:
Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number.
Mat Cutts talks about 100 links/page.
Hmm, how many links do I have in my pages ? I’ve made a simple Ruby script to count links in a page (Nokogiri, Domainatrix and Open-Uri made it trivial):
#!/usr/bin/env ruby require "rubygems" require "nokogiri" require "open-uri" require 'domainatrix' url = ARGV.first raise "*** Use: links_count <url>" unless url domain = Domainatrix.parse(url) int_links = 0 ext_links = 0 doc = Nokogiri::HTML(open(url).read) doc.xpath("//a[@href]").each do |node| link = node.get_attribute('href') if link =~ %r{\Ahttp://} l = Domainatrix.parse(link) if l.public_suffix == domain.public_suffix and l.domain == domain.domain int_links += 1 else ext_links += 1 puts link end else int_links += 1 end end puts "" puts "*** internal links: #{int_links}" puts "*** external links: #{ext_links}" puts "*** total: #{int_links + ext_links}"
Now I can see how many internal/external links contains a page. Example for CNN.com:
[vitalie@silver ~]$ links_count.rb http://www.cnn.com http://www.cnnmexico.com/ http://www.ireport.com/ http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1997325,00.html http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-459640?hpt=Mid http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-459640?hpt=Mid http://www.ireport.com/?hpt=Sbin http://twitter.com/worldcupcnn http://foursquare.com/cnn http://movie-critics.ew.com/2010/06/16/psycho-turns-50-today/ http://www.cnngo.com/hong-kong/play/beyond-star-ferry-457619 http://www.cnngo.com/bangkok/play/spirited-competition-koh-samui-regatta-706618 http://www.ireport.com/?cnn=yes http://www.turnerstoreonline.com/ http://www.cnntraveller.com http://www.cnnchile.com http://www.cnnmexico.com http://cnn.joins.com/ http://www.cnn.co.jp/ http://www.cnnturk.com/ http://www.turner.com/ http://www.cnnmediainfo.com/ http://www.turner.com/careers/ *** internal links: 263 *** external links: 22 *** total: 285