Author: Dr. Manus Ward │Head of Digital Strategy and Data Protection │Hotelconsultant.com is a qualified and experienced former hotel manager, culinary Olympic team manager and hospitality Head of School who is passionate about passing on the knowledge he gained from one of the few hotel digital strategy doctorates in the world to you the hotelier. Bonus: If you have any problems with this contact me (100% free) at manus@hotelconsultant.com or 086 8185829 on this or any aspect of your hotel’s digital strategy.
Why do we need to do this
An excessive number of outbound links on a page may reduce your PageRank and may attract a penalty.
What does this mean
Google feels that a site should have a natural amount of outbound links and that they should be appropriate to the page i.e. your outbound links should be related to hotels or the activities that guests engage in while at a hotel. Remember Google ranks pages not sites so the links should be relevant to each individual page.
How many links are too many: Google’s Chief Search Engineer has officially stated “keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number, fewer than 100” so use 100 as your absolute maximum number. He has since said that it is OK to exceed this number but that Google may examine your site to see if it is spammy. So think carefully before exceeding 100 links per page.
What do I do: Create outbound links as we said that are relevant to each individual page but keep them under 100 links in total per page.
How do I check the number of links on my pages: Click on http://www.submitexpress.com/free-tools/link-counter-tool/ and do the following.
The number of links are on the next page.
This page has a total of 149 links which may bring the attention of Google but the site is not spammy so it will not be penalised. The number of outbound links on this particular hotel site is only 13, well below the 100 maximum advised by Google, so this is fine. The number of internal links exceeds 100 so this hotel should reconsider the number of links if only for PageRank purposes.
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