I'm working on the code for a collaborative project that will eventually have hundreds of pages. The editor of this project wants all pages to be listed in the main navigation at the top of the site. There are four main dropdown (suckerfish-style) menus and these have nested sub- and sub-sub-menus. Putting aside the UI issues this creates, I'm concerned about how Google will find our content on the page. Right now, we now have over 120 links above the main content of the page and have plans to add more as time goes on (as new pages are created).
Perhaps of note, these navigation elements are within an html5
<nav>element:
<nav id="access" role="navigation">
Do you think that Google is savvy enough to overlook the "abundant" navigation links and focus on the content of the page below? Will the
<nav>element help us get away with this navigation strategy? Or should I reel some of these navigation pages into categories? As you might surmise the site has a fairly flat structure, hence the lack of category pages.</nav>
</nav>
</nav>
