Link Count Per Page Including JavaScript Links - Should We Worry About Them?

[abernhardt]

With large ecommerce sites, we usually have more than 100 links per page and many times have more than 200 links on each page due to links and images in the header, footer, guided navigation and then the body product grid and content.

When I use most on-page link counting tools like SEO x-ray and the SEO Moz Pro crawl report, I notice that every visible link on the page gets counted. This includes and javascript based links that expand the product grid to 30, 60 or view all, javascript sorting links, javascript links to view customer reviews for each product. etc.

There was a QA post here http://www.seomoz.org/q/should-i-nofollow-the-main-navigation-on-certain-pages about nofollowing and page rank sculpting and it seems pretty unanimous that most don't think that page rank sculpting is very valuable.

So my question is, are the javascript links on pages that don't link to another page viewed differently by search engines? If so, shouldn't there be a way to see on-page link count minus javascript call links that don't actually link to another page?

To expand a bit on my question, we also use nofollow attributes on the text links in the left navigation that are meant for refining products just as the javascript links in the product grid are meant to refine the products, sort them, allow for product comparison, allow for viewing customer reviews, etc.

So should it be ok to have 300 links on a page if the unimportant ones that you don't want crawled like the left navigation refinements and product grid javascript links all have rel="nofollow" applied to them?

I know that would basicly be PageRank sculting, but it seems like the best options for shopping sites that have a lot of navigation links.

[AlanMosley]

I would be worried that the js links are using linkjuice but not delivering it to the page, it may be evaperating

As for link sculpting, linksculpting with no-follow is dead, but you shoudl be worried where your link jucie flows. using the flat linking structure as rank has bloged about is the best mathmaticly, but you need to also consider users.

[abernhardt]

More along the lines of 100 to 500 per page depending on the page, and about 1/4 to 1/2 of the links are javascript links depending on whether or not there is a product grid. The javascript links are there for the user to refine content and aren't for search engines.