steveb - 11:50 pm on Jul 7, 2008 (gmt 0)

The point of navigation is to navigate. You want your visitors to find things they are looking for, while benefitting yourself. If done right, what follows from this is direct SEO benefit, as things more people want are linked to more.

Having a nav link on a "yarn" page to your "bazookas" page is not going to be anything more than clutter to a user on the yarn page. A link to a "weapons" page is far more useful, as presumably anyone looking for a bazooka knows it is a weapon. Likewise, people on the bazooka page will more likely like to see a "speargun" link than a "yarn" one, but wouldn't have a problem with a menu with a "crafts" link or soemthing like that.

If you have a site about lots of things, you should do your visitors a favor and organize your navigation to send them easily to the 99% of things they are likely interested in that are related, while making the unrelated stuff that 1% might look for (the yarn user bazooka owners) findable but with more difficulty. You end up with links from related stuff to related stuff, and with more links to your popular stuff and less links to your obscure stuff.