Problem with left navigation links on an e-commerce site diluting pagerank

[Ralzaider]

I'm trying to decide how to deal with left navigation links on my e-commerce website diluting the amount of link juice passed to other links on the page. Any suggestions? Only options I can think of are:

• Nofollow the links
• use javascript (I'm assuming googlebots are still able to find these)
• Leave them as they are as followed links

[Ralzaider]

The links on our left navigation are not category links, they are refinement links within the same category. Here's an example page from our website:

http://www.safetyvests.com/color/orange/

[EGOL]

You listed three options.....

• Nofollow the links
• use javascript (I'm assuming googlebots are still able to find these)
• Leave them as they are as followed links

Another option is, remove some or all of these links.

Another option is, instead of using these links, figure out how to get the people to use them to a category page where all of these links are presented with a beautiful menu.

.

(If this was my site I would probably add MORE links to that left nav and follow all of them.  Don't know if this is the right choice for you but on the sites that I know adding more keyword-rich links brings in more traffic.  The minor pages get more juice and all of the keywords in the left nav combine with your page content to bring in more long tail.  Might not be highly targeted traffic but its more traffic.)

[matbennett]

What are the left hand links pointing to?  If the pages are unique content, with value, I'd personally leave them.  Just make sure that the links to your key content appear before them in your code.

If they don't link to unique content, but still have value (ie price filtering and similar), then you could use rel=canonical on the page and remove the passed variables in webmaster tools.

I'd be more worried about the chance of them creating duplicate content than leaking internal rank.  Plus just using NF causes it to dissipate anyway, as Adam says.

[AdamThompson]

Nofollowing links will NOT pass more link juice to other links on the page. The link juice simply disappears for nofollowed links. This was put into effect a year or two ago.

[idreams]

we have the same problem. it is becoming imposible for me to control these links.. the good amount looks which we can have are 100 but it is difficult to control these links at 100 as we have lot of items on sale and to provide the use easy navigatin must put lot of links in this menu

still finding a solution for this problem

[cfguti]

The left navigation is the same at the top? If you have more categories it's important to follow these links.

How many products have the page... use pagination and a standar view for users/robots with 100 link aprox. and give the user the posibility of change this view, but the standar view for robots to index is the 100.

I hope it helps!

bye