Too many links on page -- how to fix

[novellseo]

We are getting reports that there are too many links on most of the pages in one of the sites we manage.

Not just a few too many...  275 (versus <100 that is the target).

The entire site is built with a very heavy global navigation, which contains a lot of links -- so while the users don't see all of that, Google does.

Short of re-architecting the site, can you suggest ways to provide site navigation that don't violate this rule?

[KeriMorgret]

Dr. Pete has a good post about this warning at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many that may help you out.

[novellseo]

How much damage does this issue really do?

I see many sites in our industry (enterprise software) whose pages are equally heavy with links.  They still seem to enjoy a high page rank.  Look at Microsoft, IBM, Oracle,  Red Hat...

Just wondering how this compares to other issues that would be easier to address.

[novellseo]

I don't know what you mean that users don't see the links and Google does.

I mean that most of these links are on drop-down menus so they aren't visible unless someone hovers over the tab.  My point was that the user experience isn't affected by the presence of all of these links on the page, even though it is a problem from an SEO perspective.

The page in question is:  http://www.novell.com/products/groupwise/ -- but since we use the same global navigation across the entire site, every page on the site is getting the same SEOMoz warning about too many links.

[AndyMacLean]

I do think a navigation restructure is the way to do it and a way to better focus your link juice. No following certain links no longer works for internal site links - Google see's through that now.

Instead of your categories nav including a/or multiple sub cat nav links (im guessing thats how it currently works) on every page, inc the sub cat links on the main cat pages not as part of the main cat nav e.g. dont inc red widget, blue widget, green widget under the main 'widget' navigation, instead add links to red, blue, green widget on the main widget page. Hope that makes sense.

[irvingw]

You should bucket the categories into 10-20 primary categories. If you have have lower level categories that are potential traffic drivers, you can feature a few select categories along the primary categories. Every link takes away Pagerank from the host page and too many links on every page will devalue the pages. It's hard to give clear directions without seeing the site,

I don't know what you mean that users don't see the links and Google does. Are you hiding links? That may penalize the site.