I have a client where every page has over 100 links

[digimech]

Some links are in the main navigation (it has a secondary and tertiary level) and some links are repeated in the left navigation. Every page has over 100 links if crawled.

From a practical standpoint, would you (a) delete the 3rd-level links (or at least argue for that) or (b) rel='nofollow' them? From a usability standpoint, this setup works as they are almost one click from everything. From a crawl standpoint, I see some pages missed in google (the sitemap has over 200 links).

Looking for the best on-page current SEO advice to set these guys on the road to success.

[digimech]

The site isn't low quality (there are no ads and they don't sell anything -- it is a scientific site) -- it's just that EVERY link is available as a secondary or tertiary link. My initial thought is to simply get rid of the tertiary level within the main nav, cutting out roughly half of the links. On any inside page, they are available on a left-side nav anyway. The smallest number of links is about 110, the largest is pushing 250. I just wondered about everyone's opinion.

Rendering the menu via jQuery as Chad suggests might help. This is a wordpress-based site so I'll have to really look into it as they have to edit it too.

We've already begun mapping out clicks as goals (conversions) within GA.

[AndyMacLean]

If the site has good authority/PR I wouldnt worry about it although I would look at in-page analytics to see whether people actually click the links. If its setup like this to pass link juice the above is more applicable, if not look at whether people are actually clicking the links and if they arent id suggest an alternative navigation.

[CoreyNorthcutt]

First off, never use rel='nofollow' to your own site.

Personally, I would trim up the left menu if you can, or find an easier / creative JavaScript-driven way to present the data.  The 100 links thing isn't a law written in stone.  SEOmoz's tools do yell about it if you go over 100 links.  This "100 link lore" comes from a Matt Cutts blog post:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-many-links-per-page/

If you look close, you may notice that there are more than 100 links even on the page that Matt wrote about this.  It's kind of a loose guideline in my eyes.  From my own professional experience, if every page on your site has 500 links, you're going to hurt for it.  But if you have 125 links on quite a few pages, or put out a blog post that's just an insane resource that links to a few hundred people, you'll still be just fine.

I'd think about it as just one more signal of a potentially abusive or low quality site.  If your site isn't under heavy scrutiny for other reasons, and you don't go totally nuts with links, you'll probably be just fine, but there is a lot of wisdom in Matt Cutt's post all the same.  Eliminate the unnecessary and things will work better, in and out of Google.

[CHADHARRIS]

Use jQuery- it will basically solve all your to many links on a page.

Chad

[goodlegaladvice]

nofollow is not a good idea if you have a good pagerank I wouldn't worry about it.  But remove duplicates first..

[cogbox]

We had a similar issue with one site -- a footer with a ton of links to all parts of the site, duplicated on every page. The feeling was that it flattened out the site's link structure too much, so we changed it so that the footer was loaded via ajax on page load.

In that case, I don't think it made much difference performance-wise so I can't say for certain if it will help you. But, it is a way to clean up your link structure.