The straight forward answer is less than 100 links per page.
Official Google answer can be found here:
But why Google recommends this many links on one page?
What theory is behind this recommendation?
Why 100, why not 200 or 110 or some other number?
Will I get penalized if I put more than 100 links on one page of my site?
If my site navigation needs to have more than 100 links per page, then what should I do?
The above questions plus many other questions rise in minds of many webmasters. I have seen many people asking these and other related questions in different online forums.
I personally did not know answers to any of the above questions. So I decided to keep the number of links on one page to the minimum. I thought that: as Google recommends 100 or fewer links per page, then it CAN mean that: the less links we have on our site’s pages, the better it will be.
I don’t know why I thought this way : )
I always tried to have less than 20 links per page.
Just few days back, Matt Cutts wrote a blog post about this matter. The post had about 400 or so words but it answered all the questions about the number of links that we can have on single page of our site.
The reason why Matt Cutts decided to talk about this matter was that: he was just going to add a blog post in his site that was going to contain about 200 links.
Matt Cutts stated that: the reason why Google originally recommended having 100 links per page was: In the past Google only indexed pages that have a page size of 100KB or less.
Matt Cutts also said: If a page used to have more than 100KB page size, then Google might not index the page or will index the page only partially.
So in the past, having a page size greater than 100KB was not be a good idea: as the page might never index or only index partially.
So, what does page size has to do with the number of links per page?
Matt Cutts stated that: with respect to the page size that Google used to index, 100 links per page was the right recommendation. Having more links on a page means larger page size.
Nowadays, Google index pages that have 100KB+ size.
So then why Google still recommend having the same amount of links per page?
Matt Cutts stated that: having less than 100 links on a page is beneficiary for the visitors of the site.
Too many links can make a page look like a Link Castle. A new visitor will [most probably] have no idea about where he needs to go.
But Matt Cutts said that, a page can have more than the recommended links only if it benefits the user.
Sometimes, having 100+ links is a need of a site or a page.
Will I get a penalty if I put more than 100 links on one page of my site?
If I put 100+ links on a page then Google will consider my page [or site] as Spam?
According to what Matt Cutts said:
No, Google do not penalize a site or page for having 100+ links. Google do not consider such pages as spam.
This recommendation [of having <100 links] is to make good quality sites for visitors. It will help to make sites that will be easy to use for the users.
Matt Cutts also said that, if a site uses too many links per page and that the intentions are spammy, then Google will consider the site or page as spam.
Bad intentions can include: having so many links with long anchor text. Links that give zero benefits to the users.
The good news is that Google do not automatically consider a site or a page as spam [links per page related spam]. I guess some Google team member review such pages manually to see if it’s a spam or not [just my own thoughts].
So, it is ok to have lot of links per page?
I still suggest to have less links per page.
Matt Cutts said that, if there are too many links on a page, then Google bot might not crawl all the listed links.
And having too many links will divide the page rank among all the listed links. This will result in giving away very small amount of PR to each listed link.
I guess there are still good reasons to avoid having too many links on one single page.
So, I personally will continue to have a reasonable amount of links per page and that amount will be nowhere near 100.
