What is the ideal number of links to have per page? What is the maximum number of links on a particular page that Googlebot will spider?

well i will stick to atleast 50 max per page.

Uh oh! My homepage has near 200! :eek:

I have heard that it's somewhere around 100 but I won't chisel that in stone. In terms of link exchanges I will only put 25 to 30 on a page. And I won't trade with a site that uses more. The PR that passes will be pretty diluted at more than that.

Google suggests to webmasters not use more than 100 links per page. Ok, cool, we dont always listen to Google though...However, if you want to exchange links then you'll find most people who are switched on in this area wont reciprocate if there are more than 15-20 links on the page you intend to put their link on.

(More on this in the 'SEO Made Easy' book in my sig - free!)

according to Google (http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html) a page should have less then 100 links.

though less links you have the better...

I don't think there is a definitive answer, but 100 is the industry standard. But then again, look at Craigslist, and Wikipedia. Is there anything but links on these sites?

This is another criteria that needs to find a balance. The whole epidemic to building links is created by the concept that Google rewards web pages that have greater link popularity. In most cases this has some validity, today. We know that the Google algos administer penalties to pages that contain only links on them, even though it may not appear to be the case. Web sites that have web pages containing many links on them can perform well in a keyphrase search but usually would perform even better with less links on them. This follows the original concept established at Sanford regarding PageRank. The more links going from the pages of a web site to other sites, the more PageRank it bled externally.

More and more, Google is swaying towards rewarding web pages that are intended for the Internet visitor. This makes sense. We know that Google is presently in a major renovation of it's algos and of it's PageRanking criteria. Link building has been abused for too long. Seldomly anymore do we get the best web site for the keyphrase search. We get the one that has the most links to it ( I'm talking about PR5+ keyphrase competitions in general ). How Google latest update will affect the SERPs, nobody knows. I feel safe to assume that Google wants to stick around for a while as a major search engine, even though it has it's fingers in other cookie jars. We have seen over the years what happens to search engines that stray too far away from what they originally intent. They begin to forget about the Internet visitor and with providing the visitor with the best results for keyphrase searches.

In keyphrase competitions whereas the top players are PR4's and less, link popularity is not as important an issue as in PR5+ keyphrase competitions. There exists PR4's that have no backlinks at all, although these examples are becoming harder to find. I was having this discussion somewhere else and went looking for an example the other day but couldn't find one. I did however find a PR4 that had one backlink ( checked in MSN and Yahoo as well ). I see PR2 web pages beating out PR5's in keyphrase competitions regularly. Heck, I can provide an example of a PR0 that smokes 1.9 million other keyphrase competitors.

I suggest concentrating on the internal content. Build more pages and do it logically for both the visitor and the spider. If on a page the content naturally calls for twenty links, then by all means put twenty links. Pages that are built to satisfy link exchanges are becoming of little value for the Internet visitor, thus little value in the SERPs. That's why the Internet visitor performs a search initially, to find a web site that satisfies his search requirements, not to find web sites that have pages and pages of linked external site.

Also, Google doesn't differentiate between internal and external links. If you want your Entrance page to perform better, include a keyphrase rich textual link to it from all your pages. When a web site is entirely built around five or six keyphrases and the internal linking structure is sound and decisively powerful, this frequently is sufficient to outperform the keyphrase challengers.

i would limit it to maximum 20 . and also i will place only inbound links on pages . it does not affect your ranking how many sites links you have placed however it really affect how many sites have placed your link on there site