MichaelBluejay - 5:51 pm on May 23, 2009 (gmt 0)

Let's back up a minute here, and rephrase the question: "Why _on Earth_ would Google consider internal links to be spam?" The reason this is important is that unless you start thinking about things from Google's point of view, you will have an *infinite* number of unnecessary questions about about what Google thinks is spam, e.g.:

* Does Google think pages with black backgrounds are spam?
* Does Google care if my site is in two columns instead of one column?
* Will Google penalize me if I have two Home links on each page?

All of these things, including the thing asked about, are completely irrelevant. Why should they be otherwise? Again, why on Earth would Google care that each page has a bunch of internal links? Do those links detract from the quality of the site? If not, then why should Google care?

I can tell you that I do the exact same thing (drop-down menus with copious internal links on every page) and my search rankings couldn't be better, but if you focus on this answer rather than the previous one, you're missing the point.