Nofollow internal links

[Essentia]

Hi, we have problems with having too many links on page.

Our website has a menu with 3 level sub-navigation drop down for categories which we want to maintain, for easy-navigation for the users.

http://www.redwrappings.com.au/

After reading this article: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/questions-answers-with-googles-spam-guru, and some other articles, we came up with a solution.

We can easily reduce the number of links per page by putting 'nofollow' on our categories links menu dropdown and create a separate 'landing page' that contains links to these categories (and allow 'follow' links for robots).

Is it wise to do this? Or any better, easy solution that you can suggest?

Thanks

[oznappies]

I agree with Ryan but question the usability factor of 260 links on your page. Have you done a usability study to check how easily your end users can find the information they are after. It can be daunting for a robot let alone a human to sift through all the sub-menus on your categories. It brings to mind Telstra and Optus sites that take a significant time to find the information your are after because of the huge number of options.

I also notice that when you change currency that a prompt is displayed that 'all items in the shopping cart will be deleted' even when the cart is empty. Should you not check if the cart is empty before displaying the message, otherwise the prompt is defunct.

If you want to still display them but not have the robots index them late populate them from a JQuery async call on demand as the user hovers over a menu item. You would need to ensure they are linked somewhere or on a sitemap so the search engines can still find them.

[RyanKent]

You should not use the nofollow tag on internal links. That would be a bad idea. The nofollow tag sends a signal that you don't endorse or trust the link, which is certainly not the case for internal links. Also, it is still viewed as a link so it doesn't help lower your link count. Instead it stops the link juice from flowing to those pages.

You have 260 links which is high but not necessarily a problem. The old guideline of 100 links is no longer in place and I have heard others specifically mention successful sites with 250+ links on a page. With that said, you should take an opportunity to review your site and evaluate the helpfulness of each link.

You header, navigation bar, side bar and footer each offer a lot of links. You may want to decide which links are most popular or most important, and let some of the other links go. As for your suggestion on the category landing page, that can help.

Before making any change I would suggest you forget about search engines and focus entirely on the user experience. Ask yourself how you can adjust your site to improve things for your customers. A good test would be grabbing anyone you can find who has never been to your site and ask them to use it. Watch carefully as they make selections. Which pages were easy for them to find? Which pages did they struggle on? Which pages did you want to grab the mouse and say "it's right here!". What's intuitive for you may not be intuitive for your customers.

Once you are done, then take a fresh look at the number of links. I think you can cut down the number, but if you truly felt it was best to have 250 links, than know that is not "too many" in Google's eyes, but you could better optimize your page for improved SEO by reducing the number.