What is Link Density?

Link density matters because links do two separate jobs in search. Googlebot and other crawlers follow links to discover new pages to crawl; Google's indexing and ranking systems then read link relationships as signals of context, importance, and relevance. Google sets no limit on how many links a page can carry. The real cost of a link-heavy page is dilution: when everything links to everything, Google can't tell which pages matter most, and each link passes less value, a point Google's John Mueller made in a July 2021 Search Central hangout. Manipulative links, not link counts, are what Google's spam policies penalize.

Calculating link density

Divide the number of hyperlinks on a page by its total word count, usually expressed as links per 100 or per 1,000 words. A 1,000-word post with 20 links has a link density of 2 links per 100 words. Count everything a crawler sees: per Google's link best practices, Google parses every <a> element with an href attribute on the rendered page, so navigation menus, footers, sidebars, and tag clouds all add to the total, not just the links in your article body.

How many links are too many?

There's no magic number. Google's link documentation says there's no ideal number of links for a page and offers one test: “if you think it's too much, then it probably is.” The old webmaster guideline to keep pages under 100 links was retired years ago. Instead of chasing a count, judge each link by the job it does. Keep a link when it cites a claim, explains something unfamiliar, or gives the reader a useful next step: internal links to related pages, external links to your sources. Cut links that repeat an earlier one, point somewhere irrelevant, or exist only for crawlers.

Where link density goes wrong

The usual culprit is the template, not the article. Navigation menus, footers, and tag clouds can push a page's total link count into the hundreds, burying the handful of in-content links that describe what the page is about. Audit per-page link counts with an SEO crawler such as Screaming Frog, then trim the template links a reader would never click. If your problem is spammy backlinks pointing at your site from elsewhere, you can disavow them in Search Console, which asks Google to ignore those links when assessing your site's ranking. Google says most sites never need that tool: it's only for a considerable number of spammy links that have caused, or will likely cause, a manual action, and using it incorrectly can hurt your site's performance.

Link density vs. keyword density

Searchers often mix these up, but they measure different things:

• Link density counts the hyperlinks on a page relative to its total content.
• Keyword density counts how often a keyword appears per total words.

Both are on-page ratios with no official Google target, and an extreme value in either is a sign the page was written for crawlers, not readers. Write for readers first and both ratios tend to take care of themselves.