Probably a stupid question...

[virgohippy]

Originally Posted by Halfdeck

In other words, a page with too many links may not be all that user-friendly (e.g. huge LL category page forcing a surfer to scroll down to find free site listings). Googlebot may also prefer to crawl pages with moderate number of links or limit the number of links it crawls depending on site trust (speculation)

...if Google assumed that any page over 100 links is more likely to be spam, that would result in many high-profile false positives, including cnn.com (~142 links), amazon.com (~203), and ebay.com (~143).

Fresh content in the middle of a large page does seem a bit non-userfriendly.

Google seems to favor more of my pages with a smaller number of links, a higher non-linked text to linked text ratio, and a smaller file size.

I imagine with design elements a balance of all things is more important than the (non)presence of certain other tactics?

Originally Posted by BishopWeber

I used sitemaps in a site and it was not indexed for about 6 or 7 month, not a single page. Then someone told me that becouse of the spam, google deindexed sites using sitemaps, so I take off the sitemap and in a few weeks my site was indexed. May be a coincidence, who knows, google acts in strange ways.

I've not had a problem with using sitemaps. But I've only used them on sites that already had more than a few valuable back links, so they weren't entirely necessary.