Too Many On-Page Links

[Aviatech]

Hello.  So, my SEO team has worked very hard to finally resolve RogerBot/GoogleBot specific Crawl Errors either manually or programmatically can be fixed for our Budget Blinds USA Pro Campaign.  We've done a good job even if a lot of it came from Robots.txt file entries as this was the most efficient way our client chose to do it.  Good news is most of it is CMS configuration and not bad site architecture.

That being said our next big volume of Crawl Errors is "Too Many On-Page Links". Our Moz DomainRank is 61.  Our client, on this new version of the website, added a large nav-based footer which has duplicate links from the Header Main Navigation.

I believe our solution is to put in No-Follow Metatags at the Footer Link Level, so we don't zap Page Authority by over-dividing as you recommend.

Is this the best way to resolve this?  Is there any risk in this?  Or is a 61 DomainRank high enough for RogerBot and GoogleBot to crawl these anyway?

Please advise,

[TakeshiYoung]

First of all, do not, I repeat DO NOT nofollow your own internal pages. Doing so will not result in your other links getting more link value, but will result in link juice evaporation:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-maybe-changes-how-the-pagerank-algorithm-handles-nofollow

If don't want to divide your link equity, the best solution is to simply remove the link. I would encourage you to install a tool such as CrazyEgg or ClickTale that will show you exactly how your users are using your site. Chances are they are not clicking on many of those footer links. Based on that click data, remove the links that aren't being clicked on.

Also, having a few more links than what SEOMoz recommends is not the end of the world, especially for a high Domain Authority site like yours.

[bradwayland]

Make sure you check out this

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

I guess the larger question has to do with the point of having so many links in the footer.  I think Google has overcome most of their issues with lots of links on the page but the main question I would have revolves around what is good for users.  If it were my site I would probably pare down the links some to make it as user friendly as possible.

Your domainrank of 61 probably has more to do with your incoming link profile than your on page factors.  In my experience I would not correlate these two items so closely.

If Moz is telling you to reduce the links then I would probably consider reducing them but at the same time if having more links is better for your users then I would probably stick with it.

Hope this helps.