Link masking in WordPress

[CsmBill]

in Wordpress, I want to block Google from crawling my site using the primary navigation. I want to use anchor text links in the body and custom menus in the sidebar to make maximum benefit of the "first link counts" rule.

In short, I want to obfuscate all of the links in my primary navigation without using the dreaded nofollow. I do not want to block other links to the pages - body text, custom menus, etc. . This would be site wide. I'd rather not use Ajax or any type of programming unless it's part of a plugin.

Can anyone make a simple, Google-friendly suggestion?

[Chris.Menke]

I've seen people recreate their primary landing pages at new URLs, link to them from a custom sidebar menu, and then rel=canonical the original landing pages, linked to from their primary navigation, to those new URLs.  I wouldn't do it, though.

[AlanBleiweiss]

First, don't get too lost in the "first link counts" concept in this scenario.  Your site's primary navigation should always be recognized as the most important links across the site, so while you may have custom alternate navigation such as in a sidebar, without sitewide navigation being identified as sitewide navigation, that will confuse search engine algorithms in regard to the most important top level pages on the site.

Next, you can try all sorts of tricks and techniques to obfuscate links, however Google does read JavaScript, CSS, and AJAX so attempting to hide links in those methods would be dangerous at best, and even more problematic at worst.  This is because 1) their system may wonder "why is this site owner trying to bury links across the entire site" and 2) they are far from perfect in how they interpret what they do find in those methods.  That can then cause even more flawed interpretations.

Bottom line - you are gambling with the efficiency of the crawl process and setting the site up for failed identification of proper relationships vital to SEO.