"Too many links" - PageRank question

[JamesFx]

This question seems to come up a lot.

70 flat page site. For ease of navigation, I want to link every page to one-another.

Pure CSS Dropdown menu with categories - each expanding to each of the subpage. Made, implemented, remade smartphone friendly. Hurray.

I thought this was an SEO principle - ensuring good site navigation and good internal linking. Not forcing your users to hit "back". Not forcing your users to jump through hoops.

But unless I've misread http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many then this is something that's indirectly penalised by Google because a site with 70 links from its homepage only lets each sub-page inherit 1/80th of its PageRank.

Good site navigation vs your subpages are invisible on Google.

[JamesFx]

Think pretty much any Javascript menu would be obfuscated for Google..... but bit of a grey hat approach though. Been reading some interesting articles about pageRank sculpting and whether it's still possible.

[CHADHARRIS]

James,

I'm with Mat.  I believe in user experience.  There is a way around the too many links, you need a developer that understand Jquery.  Basically, the Too Many Links issue gets resolved that way- I have an insane amount of too many links- we know have less than the 100.

Chad

[matbennett]

If that is what makes sense then do it.

Adding a second tier of structure would allow you to direct more rank to certain areas (tier 1 all get an equal share of rank, having more links in some categories than others would force more page rank towards those). However the overall effect of that is less overall rank reaching the bottom pages.

Personally I would go with user experience first.  If linking to all 70 in the menu makes sense then do that. What is the point in even ranking a site that people don't want to use because it's a pain to navigate?  Then use cross linking to add greater emphasis to those that you want to reinforce.