If I have too many on-page links can I reduce it with nofollow tags or do the links have to be removed?

[CSA-231671]

On my site I have a top nav drop down menu but once visitors go to one particularly large subsection, that menu is repeated on the left for easier viewing. As a result, I shoot over 100 links on page. Can I put nofollow or noindex tags on the left side links and reduce my "official" on-page links count or do I have to actually eliminate some of the links?

Thanks,

Oak

[RickGa]

I think you need to get more clear concept about nofollow. Most of the time people think about passing link juice. ask youself; are all those links important for your visitors and all those pages linked from left bar important too, if so then why nofollow. You are giving your visitor the right thing.  Having said that you need to rethink about links too sometimes we think having many links on one page will benefit visitors, in reality its wrong. you need to design your site navigation in such a way where ppl can easy go from one page to another page. Usability is key too. Group your links, pages and content and design everything from customer prespective. Google love sites, which are develop for customers. Anyways nofollow is not and never been a solution, inshort most of the people have wrong concepts about nofollow.

Hope this will make some sense to you.

Regards

[CSA-231671]

It helps, it's just not what I wanted to hear. Thanks for your quick reply.

[AndyKuiper]

You cannot 'reduce' the link count (from Google's perspective) by the use of nofollow (you used to be able to do this somewhat - 'link sculpting'), or meta tags. You'll need to reduce the number of links on the page. Sorry for the bad news.

Hope this helps

Andy

...however, if these are internal links, and I suspect they are, Google has recently made efforts to reduce the 'impact' of navigation links SEO wise - you might just be ok.