Balance of frame text to content text

Can too much navigation obscure the actual content?

[sublime1]

Our site has a consistent set of navigation tools in the header, left column, and footer.

Our testing shows that users find the navigation tools helpful. But in parts of the site we have lots of links (50+) on the left side. They seem to help with SEO -- pages that don't get linked on the left rarely perform as well as those that do.

Some of the pages have useful and unique but short content. In an extreme case, I counted 680 words on the page, of which 85 were the actual content (only 15%). A typical page is more like 60% content.

We try to guide the indexers by using good titles, heading tags and so on to enclose and isolate the content from the frame.

But I am not sure if page structure is enough to help the crawlers see the content.

What do you think? (I know no one around here ever has an opinion about these things :-)

[tedster]

I asume you are not using the word "frame" in a technical sense but to mean the repeated page template's content, rather than the specific, unique content of the page, correct? In other words, there is no frameset involved.

If so, you may find this recent thread useful - Google's Adam Lasnik discusses something quite related to what you've noticed.
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