arieng - 5:01 pm on Nov 5, 2009 (gmt 0)

I've been working on an SEO project for an ecommerce site that currently has around 800 links on the home page. This is a company that has over 600 product categories organized into three tiers, each with a home page link. At first, I thought there were too many links on the page, but they have programmed a collapsing/contracting navigation menu that works really well. I am beginning to agree that removing links would be detrimental to site usability.

The site owner asked if there was a way to prioritize the links for the Google spider. The only thing that came to mind was the Priority attribute in an XML sitemap.

I know that XML sitemaps are only "suggestions" for the search engines. I've used the attribute on smaller projects in the past, but don't have any data that would support whether search engines even pay attention to that attribute.

Anyone using the priority attribute in their sitemap? Is there any way that this could have a negative effect? Any chance that it would have any effect on how a spider would view a home page with 800 links?