Most SEO professionals realize the importance of links to their sites, and work diligently to get lots of the ‘right’ type of links (to relevant, in-niche sites) on their blogs and websites.
The number of links placed on any particular page has been a source of great debate among SEO pros for some time. Typically, the maximum number of hyperlinks that SEO masters like to see on a page is 100. It seems to be based on some Google sources, and even in 2009 Matt Cutts quoted Google’s guidelines, which say to keep the links on each page reasonable (fewer than 100.) Also according to Google, this has never been a hard and fast rule and should not garner any penalties.
This limit seems to have been imposed due to the amount of data that could be processed by the early crawlers because of bandwidth limitations at the time. At that time, Google probably started ignoring links after the 100 links point.
A review of Google’s guidelines today will show that the “fewer than 100” phrase has been removed. It seems that if a page has lots of good and informative links, Google is still interested even if the page has more than 100 links. In other words, like many of Google’s guidelines, it depends on the site’s Page Rank, and therefore, its authority.
However, more links can dilute the Page Rank passed on to the internal pages, and to pages that the links point to since the amount of PR the page has is divided by the number of links on that page.
How many links should a page have?
Because the question is very complex, based on complicated Page Rank math, there is no one correct answer. A balance of building a site structure that is not too deep, and having enough links to pass PR from is important. A flat architecture that has many pages far removed from high-authority page links means that each page gets equal link and PR treatment. The problem is that most sites put their most important message up front, and the following pages are truly of less importance.
Therefore, focusing the site’s internal Page Rank on the important pages up front first will give the site a balanced approach, with the most links on the first few pages. As far as the 100 links per page number, it probably is still a good rule of thumb for most sites