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That was my thought process as well. Thanks Alan!

So I started making a sitemap for our new golf site, which has quite a few "low level" pages (about 100 for the golf courses that exist in the area, and then about 50 for course architects), etc etc.

My question/open discussion is simple.  In a sitemap that already has about 50 links, should we include these other low level 150 links?  Of course, the link to the "Golf Courses" is there, along with a link to the "Course Architects" MAIN pages (which, subdivides on THOSE pages.)

I have read the limit is around 150 links on the sitemap.html page and while it would be nice to rank long tail for the Golf Courses.

All in all, our site architecture itself is easily crawlable as well. So the main question is just to include ALL the links or just the main ones?

Thoughts?

Hey everyone. We are about to create a sitemap.html page and have always just kept the site theme in place and put the sitemap in the "content" section of the page, with the header navigation, sidebars and footer in place.

Well, now with the new "only first link counts" Google rule, wouldn't it be better to just have a "plain" html sitemap page without any other links on it?

We are working on a new website that is golf related and wondering about whether or not we should set up a subnavigation dropdown menu from the main menu.

For example:

GOLF PACKAGES
  >> 2 Round Packages
  >> 3 Round Packages
  >> 4 Round Packages
  >> 5 Round Packages

GOLF COURSES
  >> North End Courses
  >> Central Courses
  >> South End Courses

This would actually be very beneficial to our users from a usability standpoint, BUT what about from an SEO standpoint? Is diverting all the link juice to these inner pages from the main site navigation harmful?  Should we just create a page for GOLF PACKAGES and break it down on that page?

Thanks for the follow up. I do remember reading about page rank sculpting and that change. Good stuff! I appreciate the replies Adam.

Thank you for the reply. At the moment we have a the MAIN link on the nav for CONDOS, then the subnavs are North Myrtle, Myrtle, and South Myrtle.  If we no-follow the subnavs, will this not bring more juice to the main nav link?

Regarding the "First Link Only" rule.  Because the main navigation usually does not have the required keywords, such as "Myrtle Beach Golf Courses", instead it only says "Golf Courses", does this not ruin any and ALL links on ANY other page that may say "Myrtle Beach Golf Courses" that point to that page. Which is a more keyword rich target link?  Do we even WANT the less keyword targeted link in the main navigation to have any juice? Hence, should they be no-followed, and then use more highly targeted keywords in other places to link to that page?

Hope that makes sense.

OK - First of all, thank you to those of you who view and take the time to answer our question.

We are currently in the middle of re-designing our golf packages website, and we're trying to decide the best way to structure our Main Navigation for maximum SEO benefit while keeping user experience in mind.

The top key phrases we are currently targeting:

1) Myrtle Beach Golf     2)  Myrtle Beach Golf Packages

You can find the current navigation structure we have come up with here:

http://www.myrtlebeachsitemasters.com/index2.html

So our question is this:

We have subdivisions of:  Golf Packages, Accommodations, Golf Courses

Is it in our best interest to:

A) Get rid of the subdivisions and consolidate them to one page?

or

B) Simply "NoFollow" the subdivisions within the Main Navigation?

We are concerned about the subdivisons for 2 reasons:

1. Too many internal links in Main Navigation

2. The "first link only" rule with Google affecting our additional internal links on existing pages.

THANK YOU again to those of you who take the time to answer this question. We really appreciate any clarification on this issue.