Hey all.
Here's the scenario. I have this pretty trusted site with a relatively high PR. The navigation menu has around 300 links. But this is because it is a CSS menu that drills down into subcategories.
Now, would restricting the amount of links in this menu be beneficial? I am not worried about any subcategory pages not being crawled or indexed, but I am concerned that subcategory pages will not receive as high of PageRank if they are not linked to directly from the home page, thereby lowering the ranking potential. Even with new pages that are created they receive a PR of 5 if linked to from the home page.
But I'm also thinking that toning down the menu size would be beneficial by funneling more PageRank to category pages and increasing the likelihood of ranking for some core head/middle terms.
I have seen sites that externalize the menu in JavaScript files and disallow it in Robots.txt to prevent too much PageRank from linking out, but SEO isn't really a one-solution-fits-all in my experience.
I may try a test. Externalizing the menu may also increase the relevance for pages because I won't have a bunch of other content on the page not relevant to that page's specific keywords.
Anyone with experience in this arena? I would love to hear your input.
Thanks