Reducing homepage and menu links using nofollow?

[surfgatinho]

Having become a little more proactive in my SEO over the last month or so (after getting a large quote from an SEO company!) I've been trying to get to the bottom of why my site isn't performing as well as I think it should for certain things.

I'm beginning to think part of the problem is the navigation structure and a bit of research seems to bear this out.

I also read Tedster's very informative 'mega menu' post from about a year back. I'm definitely looking to reduce the navigation structure of the site and try to cut down the links on the home page.

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Looking at my home page there are links there that are useful to the user and point to latest content / photos etc which seemed to get picked up anyway.
In short is adding the nofollow tag going to concentrate the juice more to the other pages, i.e. is it the same as reducing the overall number of links?

[tedster]

I wouldn't suggest using nofollow in menu navigation, at least not very much. I find you get better results by building a nicely focused Information Architecture that's based on helping human users to discover your main marketing points. Too many choices often end up attracting "no choice at all".

You might want to first try tracking clicked links on your current home page for a short period, and then drop those links that almost no one uses.

[surfgatinho]

I think the main menu isn't too bad. Just under 50 links (6 top level with drop downs) to various towns (which I rank very well for) so I'm not sure I want to mess with that.

The bulk of the links on the home page are in the various sections which feature the latest / popular content, say 7 sections with 5-10 latest content. This is what I am thinking about adding the nofollow tags to.
Would this have the desired effect of sculpting the flow of PR and consolidating what G views as the theme of the site

[piatkow]

G have changed the way that they handle the flow of PR in the last year. Assuming that I have read previous threads correctly, there is no PR benefit in using nofollow, it now only does what it is supposed to do and stop the bot following the link. The "link juice" that would be allocated to that link is no longer reassigned to the followed links but just thrown away.

[surfgatinho]

Another related question I have is about repeating a link on a page. For example in the menu it may have the anchor text 'Widgets' but on the page buried in a paragraph it may say 'Keyword widgets'.

I'm assuming here it that it is good to reinforce the specific keywords here even if it is repeating the link. Plus does this drive more juice to that page or does it just count the same as one link?

Thanks for the responses so far.

[surfgatinho]

OK, so I've just invented Page Rank sculpting after it has been deprecated! Great!
[webmasterworld.com...]

Seems to me if I have earned the Page Rank I should be able to decide where it goes - that's not spamming in my book

I can see my home page becoming very ajax-centric over the next week or so

[Broadway]

>>For example in the menu it may have the anchor text 'Widgets' but on the page buried in a paragraph it may say 'Keyword widgets'.<<

As a partial answer to your question, (per Bruce Clay) only the anchor text in the first anchor "counts" in regards to Google.

[Broadway]

In a similar vein, I have a site with a home page that has a page-top index composed of 35 links to subtopics (yes, my bad, the home page looks like a sitemap, but it does ok for me in regards to bounce rate and getting people into my site). This index (plus some graphics) is about all that shows above the fold.

The remainder of the page (below the fold) contains paragraphs of text describing each topic in detail. Each paragraph contains an "in-text" link to that topic (each link is a duplicate of the one found in the page-top index).

I've done a "click map" for the page. NO ONE clicks anything below the fold (the in-text links).

I was thinking of taking out the below the fold in-text links and replacing them with a within-page "choose this topic from our page-top index" type link (possibly just so I personally would have a clearer idea of the what and why of the PR passing of this page).

Does this seem reasonable and not damaging? Does Google somehow value (or gain more information about the site) from the in-text links as opposed to the index links format? Might it be a mistake to remove the below the fold in-text links?