navigation tree size and number of links

[lpiracing]

We're looking at implementing a new navigation tree on our e-commerce site, but the navigation tree is showing all of our categories and their links, which amounts to about 2000 categories. To the user it is in a nice tree format and is not un-wieldy. These links would show up on every page as the nav tree is on the left of the page.

I'm worried Google would look at this and devalue the links for some reason?

[tedster]

If I understand you correctly, this navigation tree would place 2,000 links in the source code of every page. If so, that will definitely bring up problems of the kind detailed in this thread: The "Mega Menu" Problem and Google Rankings [webmasterworld.com]

Even if the tree utilizes an "expand/collapse" script so that all the choices are not visible in the browser at any one time, if they are in the source code, then this implementation will blur the discrete signals that Google (and any search engine, for that matter) needs to understand each page's value.

It's still a good rule of thumb to keep the total number of links on any page under 100, and I see better indexing of the entire website by keeping it under 50 per page.