Too many links on a page

[CPL]

I have a dynamic marquee on my site which I believe gives useful up to date information to my site visitors. However, I have revisited Google guidelines and checked my site on a Lynx text browser (as they suggested) and it is showing that I have 143 links on the pages of which 96 of them are from the marquee. Google say keep the links to under 100. Question is do I:-

1. Remove the marquee?
2. Reduce the number of events coming through the marquee?
3. Keep the marquee as is but remove the links?
4. Split sports, events, food offers onto different pages?
5. Randomly select around 30 marquee links per page?
6. Any other options?

Having so many I guess makes page "heavy and slow". Any ideas as to how I can deliver the same quality and amount of information fairly for my subscribing venues in a dynamic way?

PS All of the information is shown in the search results pages anyway but the marquee adds a little ooomph!! I feel. After all, the major news channels seem to think it works on TV.

Many thanks in advance for any input.

[Django]

make some of the links nofollow, that will fix the problem and keep the links on the page at the same time, so that you dont lose usability.

[Feydakin]

7. Ignore Google's 'suggestion' and do what is right for your visitors..

[Jeremy80]

I think it would be a bad idea to ignore Google's suggestion. When Google gives specific advice, it is usually best to follow it. In this case, you definitely want to limit the number of links per page. This is to ensure that pages get indexed properly and that internal pagerank is evenly distributed to important pages.

I agree with Django that you should make some of your links nofollow. It is common practice to add nofollow to links to unimportant seo pages such as privacy policy, terms and conditions, contact page, etc. It might be easier to make all your marquee links nofollow. Limiting the number of links in the marquee is a suitable alternative too.

[janiston]

as per my experience i will suggest you to use nofollow tag specially for external links and also for less weighted inner pages and duplicate link.

[intelinside]

Yes, it is better to use 'nofollow' for external links.

[nayes84]

I think it is better to make separate page for each type of links. this will increase the clearness of the subject of each page which also increase page ranking for related keywords

[Jenie0109]

remove the marquee. Marquee disturbs visitors eyes..And tends to knock off your visitors away from your site

[lhai_14]

I want to ask.. Is no follow important? What is marquee?

[nayes84]

Originally Posted by lhai_14

I want to ask.. Is no follow important? What is marquee?

nofollow is need only if you want search engine to ignore that link. this is useful to make search engines follow some important links with others you consider not imprtant for your site. like links in comments, they shouldn't be important to follow

[Peter (IMC)]

Are you trying to put as much information as possible in a page? Would that be a smart thing to do you think? What is it that you want a visitor to do on a page? Think about how a marquee would help/interfere with that. Like Jenie0109 said, it's usually disturbing. For some strange reason, website owners tend to like marquees more than website visitors.

[Bernd]

Why don't you create an own site for the "tonights events". Then put a link to this site instead of the marquee.
Nobody is waiting until dozens of events have been shown by the marquee.

[thindenim]

The 100 links limit is no longer in place. In the comments on a recent blog post Matt Cutts wrote: -

" As far as page size, we can definitely crawl much more than 101KB these days. In my copious spare time I’ll chat with some folks about upping the number of links in that guideline."

PageRank sculpting

[iPhone Fan]

I've heard that nofollow links are also taken into account by Google.

[eagag]

you can use javascript to solve this problem and make a script that dynamically generates the marquee

[shakir]

As Feydakin said.. first give preference for the vistors then for SE... If ur visiterl like th esite then Google alos will like it... bcz Google now becoming more closer to the site visters...

[sherone]

Make some of them rel=nofollow. Google gives more weightage to few links pages

[laserpointers]

my suggestion is remove marquee and make your outbound link into Nofollow

[CPL]

Thank you all very much, so many replies and I apologies for not responding sooner. (Have moved home ) I think I have come up with a solution that takes most comments into account so thanks again for your help.

With regards a couple of points from Jenie and Peter about removing the marquee. I believe it to be a subjective issue and no doubt you are right, however, news programs use "marquees" and my intention is to let people know that inside we have up to date, diverse information. If people see lot's of events "tonight" wouldn't they automatically see that we are a dynamic and up to date site? That is my hope, it's a bit of a "this is what we do at a glance" attempt and it takes up such a small space.

Regarding other No-Follow comments, I actually do want google to follow these links if they can and index them therefore using javascript won't help I am told. (they are internal and not external links).

Regarding putting visitors first, I truly thought I was by showing them a snapshot of the information they can find inside.

Nayes84 and Bernd, there are already seperate pages inside for all this stuff. (your comments make me feel that I haven't made this obvious so will relook at that, thank you).

thindenim and fathima, good posts, never knew that .

I want to help visitors, also, give licensees as much promotiopn as possible and have an aesthetically pleasing site whilst maximising SEO opportunities. (don't we all). So with this in mind I feel that part of everyone's solution is the answer and I've implimented:

Reducing the number of Marquee links and made them appear random on all pages. (30 links max).
I will add NoFollow to less important pages.

Thanks again to all who answered.