How to Have Flat Navigation w/out Diluting Link Juice

[BlairKuhnen]

I have a client with a very flat navigational structure relying on a menu with CSS hover dropdowns using simple

• items to get to just about every page on the site through the main navigation on every page.  They want this ability to remain.  The issue is stat is send link juice all over and does not concentrate into pages that are key search landing pages.  I don't want to "no Index" "follow" the less important pages since there are some brand related long tail searches that I would want these pages found.  These are useful pages to consumers who are already engaged with the brand, but not ones we would not care to rank for outside of branded search.

  If there was a way to have some links be non-crawled via javascript (or some other method) and those that are more important use a more standard html type link that would seem ideal.

  Does anyone have a suggestion for menu tool or technique for exposing to consumers all the links to consumers but restricting google bot's path while being in line with Google Webmaster guideslines?

  Blair

[BlairKuhnen]

Doug,

Somehow I missed your response.  The site has 200 pages or so linked from the navigation.  Thanks for the suggestion.  Adding some links or breadcrumbs may help.

Ideally what I would want to do is have google crawl to the important pages and not have juice flow to customer service / info only pages that in most cases have little need to rank in the SERP's.

The client wants flat navigation, and I understand the point (you can be anywhere and find these pages).  The drawback is spraying juice to non-relevant pages from a SEO perspective.  If there is a way to block crawling that is not considered cloaking, that would be the approach.

Thanks for answering.

[DougRoberts]

How many pages are we talking about here? How big is the site and how many pages as in the main navigation?

If you assume that every page is linking to every other page via the main navigation than why not add additional, in-context on-page links with relevant anchor text. This will help search engines determine the relative importance of your pages and maybe provide some additional relevancy signals too.

If all your pages have additional links back to a particular landing page then you'll raise the authority of that page.