SEO Friendly Dynamic Navigation

Javascript? Flash? Problem with # of Links

[nzap]

For almost a decade, we have had static html text links on the top of our home page and all of our pages for category navigation of our ecommerce store.

We have recently decided that it would be great to have a dynamic navigation bar at the top of all of our pages (approx. 4,000 pages).

It would be done in java script, where when they hover over a top category, it would show all the sub-categories drop down beneath it. Like the standard ones you see everywhere.

The only issue ... is that since I have about 12 main categories, and an average of about 10-12 sub-categories per main category, this would mean that I will be add somewhere around 125+ new links to every single page of my website (in the source code to generate those headers), on top of the other 30-40 links that are normally there only for products and other links.

I'm concerned that by making such a major change, Google could see all those sub-category header links as a negative and that there would generally be too many links on 1 page and those same links on every page.

Is it worth changing the navigation and risking this when we have good ranking on google? Or is there an alternative?

How can we create dynamic navigation without having to embed so many links onto all of our pages? or does it not matter?

Thank you in advance for any and all help I receive!

[webman5000]

You could consider keeping the sub-category links in an external Javascript file. But if the reason for adding extra links is to try to improve SEO, I would include the links in the HTML of every page. Possibly even go as far as to include important subcategories in the HTML and less important links inside an external .js file.

[nzap]

Thank you for the input.

[edited by: tedster at 6:36 pm (utc) on Sep. 18, 2008]