But the nitty-gritty is that now the search engines can and do crawl more than 100 links on a single document or web-page!
Yes, according to the Official Webmaster Guidelines page, it is recommended that one should keep it under 100 links per document as a document with more than 100 links can be highly oppressive for any user! It is also recommended that one should keep the navigational options as less as possible to make your document user friendly.
"Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages."
"Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100)." - Google Guidelines
We have a Googler, who confirmed the news. He said:
Just for the record, we can process more than 100 links per page :-). We do however recommend the limit of 100 because it generally makes sense for users (and search engines).
-JohnMu
About the rankings seen during part of November...
In short, no one is happy with this sudden and unexpected move. The webmasters are noticing low quality sites come into the search results as they are crawling the web to search their once high-ranked site!
Matt Cutts of Google put a post on the Webmaster Thread.
I think this was a short-term issue and things should be back to normal pretty soon (if not already).
What exactly happened? Matt elaborated later in the thread:
I don't consider those rankings indicative of anything coming in the future. Some data went into the index without all of our quality signals incorporated, and it should be mostly back to normal and continuing to get back to normal over the course of the day.
Yes, this was a bug as Matt said after giving reply to a particular question as to whether or not this was a "bug" or a "test." Matt replied, "nope, it wasn't a test."
It is really nice to see that the Googlers are coming to assist the webmasters to alleviate the concern.
