WordPress is now disabling blogs that contain blog posts that have more than 100 outgoing links in a blog post. On one of the blogs that I occasionally post on, I experienced this first-hand. This new “rule” by WordPress involves blogs that are hosted at WordPress.com, not on blogs that are hosted on your own web server.
When I logged into my dashboard on WordPress.com today, I noticed a warning message that said that posting on the blog was disabled because they had a question about one of the blog posts on my blog. I had a gut feeling that one of the blog posts was causing an issue, and most likely would need to be edited or removed.
The blog post in question was, in fact, a blog post that contained more than 100 outgoing links to other web sites. This blog post, which I have now removed, listed other blogs that allowed “do follow” comments on them. I have no problem removing the blog post, as it was over a year old and most of the links were out of date (most of the blog, I suspect, did not work anymore). However, I do admit that I did not take the time to check them all by hand or even use a 404 checker script to check the links.
Would you say that a blog post that contains more than 100 outgoing links should be considered spam? Well, I have to admit that there are some circumstances where a list of more than 100 links should be warranted. At the same time, though, I doubt that people will really follow more than 100 links. In this particular case, though, the blog post in question was a list of “do follow” blogs, which could theoretically be used for purposes of link building or link spamming, whichever you’d like to call it.
In any case, the blog post needed to be removed anyway, as it was just not useful to most people anymore. I just did not have the time or inclination to remove it.
Thanks to WordPress, though, and their fairly new “rule” of flagging posts and pages on WordPress.com that attempt to embed more than 100 URLs. After contacting WordPress Support regarding this particular issue, here is what I received from “Anthony” from WordPress:
We currently have a check in place to monitor posts/pages on WordPress.com that attempt to embed more than 100 URLs; can ((url removed)) be removed, please? Thank you.
I do not know whether or not this is a new issue that WordPress is now dealing with, but it does seem logical to me. When can you logically say that a blog post should include more than one hundred outgoing links? I certainly cannot think of any well-written blog post that includes more than 100 outgoing links. Especially for search engine optimization purposes, a few outgoing links is a good thing. But not over 100 outgoing links.
Where do you draw the line, though? Is 40 outgoing links okay? What about 50? Or fifty seven?