BradleyT - 12:52 pm on Jul 1, 2008 (gmt 0)

There was a video I watched about 6 months ago that showed something similar.

They took some e-commerce sites that had templates with large amounts of navigation and somewhat small amounts of content. When they broke the page down, there ended up being more "content" in the navigation (link text, other misc text that showed on every page) than there was in the product description area. Their solution was to change whatever you could to images (thereby reducing site template "content") and to try and get the amount of highlightable text in the "product area" to have more words than the amount of highlightable text in your navigation/site template.

They said rankings increased after this happened and I think it sounds like a similar observation.