Pages with High Outgoing Internal Links

Element Code: LI-015

Is there really a limit on outgoing links?

For years Google published advice to keep the number of links on a page to a reasonable number, phrased at one point as under 100. That specific figure was removed from the guidelines because it reflected an old indexing constraint rather than a modern ranking rule. Today there is no hard cap, and Google will happily crawl a page with many links. The real cost is different: internal PageRank is a finite pool, and every crawlable link on the page takes a share of it. Put 250 links on a page and each one carries a thin slice of authority; keep a dozen focused links and each carries far more.

How link equity actually flows

Think of each page as holding a budget of authority that it distributes across its outgoing links. The math is not perfectly even in the real algorithm, but the direction holds: fewer, more relevant links concentrate value on the pages you want to rank, while sprawling mega menus and giant footers leak equity to low priority URLs on every page they appear on. Because those sitewide links render on thousands of pages, they are often the single biggest reason a template shows a very high outlink count.

What actually counts as an outgoing internal link

A crawler counts every unique, crawlable internal URL in the rendered HTML of the page, not just the links you placed inside the article body. That total folds together four very different groups: primary navigation and mega menus, the footer, in body contextual links, and template widgets such as related posts, tag clouds, breadcrumb trails, and pagination. When a tool flags a page for a high outlink count, the first job is to separate boilerplate links that repeat on every template from the editorial links that are unique to this page. The boilerplate group is usually where the bloat lives, and fixing it once in the template quietly improves thousands of URLs at the same time.

One nuance trips people up: links injected by JavaScript are counted once the page is rendered, so a faceted filter menu or an infinite tag list that hydrates on load still adds to the outlink total that Google sees. Crawl with JavaScript rendering enabled if your navigation is script driven, otherwise the audit will undercount the real figure.

Auditing outlinks in Screaming Frog, step by step

Screaming Frog is the fastest way to quantify the problem. Run a normal crawl, open the Internal tab, and add the Outlinks column, then sort it high to low so the worst offenders float to the top. To see how internal authority pools rather than just raw counts, run Crawl Analysis so the Link Score column populates, then compare Outlinks against Link Score: a template with a huge outlink number and a thin Link Score is leaking equity. For a link level view, select a URL and open the Outlinks tab in the lower pane, or use Bulk Export, then Links, then All Outlinks to dump every source and target pair into a spreadsheet you can pivot by link position. Sitebulb reports the same idea through its internal link Hints and a per URL link equity score, which is handy when you want a second opinion or a client friendly chart.

A worked example

Say a product page reports 320 outgoing internal links. You export the outlinks and bucket them by position: 210 come from the mega menu, 44 from the footer, 18 from a related products widget, and only 48 are genuine in body links to specifications, guides, and the category. Roughly 80 percent of the equity this page could pass is spread across boilerplate that already appears on every URL, so those links do almost nothing to promote the 48 targets that matter for this product. Trimming the mega menu to its top level sections and collapsing the footer link dump to the pages that earn clicks might cut the total to about 120, which more than doubles the share of authority reaching each editorial link without touching a word of the copy.

A remediation checklist

1. Separate boilerplate from editorial: tag each link by position before you cut anything.
2. Trim sitewide templates first: shrinking a mega menu or footer improves every page at once.
3. Consolidate duplicates: if three links on the page point at the same URL, keep the single most useful one.
4. Paginate long index pages: break a 400 link archive into crawlable pages rather than one wall of links.
5. Skip nofollow sculpting: nofollow on internal links wastes equity instead of redirecting it.
6. Recrawl and compare: confirm the outlink counts dropped and Link Score on priority pages rose.

There is also a crawl budget angle on very large sites. Every extra low value link is another URL a bot may queue, so pages that fan out to hundreds of thin or near duplicate targets can slow the discovery of the URLs you actually want indexed. Concentrating links on a smaller, more deliberate set keeps both equity and crawl attention pointed at your priorities.

Finding and fixing over linked pages

Crawl the site with Screaming Frog or Sitebulb, then sort the internal report by outlinks and review the Link Score column to see how authority pools. Export the outliers and ask a blunt question of each link: does it help the reader or move them toward a conversion? If not, remove it. Consolidate near duplicate links, trim mega menus to the sections that matter, and paginate long index pages instead of dumping every URL onto one screen. Resist the temptation to sculpt with nofollow, because nofollow on internal links no longer preserves or redirects PageRank and simply wastes it. For the strategy behind purposeful linking, read our internal linking guide, compare it with the opposite problem in missing internal links, and browse the full set of link checks.

Frequently asked questions