Dropped rankings due to too many links, help needed

[tjhossy]

We have just re-designed our site and added a big drop-down navigation menu to help users get straight to the category/sub-category they are looking for, take a look at http://www.discountfiresupplies.co.uk to see what I mean. Since doing so our rankings have dropped which we've been told may be because there are now so many links on (particularly) the home page diluting the rankings of that page. We've been advised that if we hide the drop-down menus using "style='display: none'" until they are required that the search engines will ignore them which we have now done but is this correct or will they still be indexed? And if so do you have any other suggestions?

Thanks, Tariq

[Malarowski]

You could just nofollow the links you don't want to lead to nonindexed sites. This way Google will stop there. Other than that editing your robots.txt to exclude what you don't want to show up would work.

[joseph.chambers]

You also need long tail and branded links. Don't stop building links to justify the change. You should see a change back in the SERPs in about 3 weeks. I did the same thing.

[gfiorelli1]

To use nofollow for pr sculpting is not anymore a valid tactic. As explained quite a long time ago (2009?) nofollow links are counted for the link equity distribution, with the only exception that the pr evaporates as it is not "assigned" to the page the no followed link refers to.

[KyleJohnson40]

First of all, I like your new design, and typically, large sub-navs are excellent for usability and spidering. As Michael Martinez from seo-theory.com once eloquently put it: "[PageRank] was made to be wasted. Real SEOs understand that."

If you think of your homepage as a balloon and PageRank helium, then trying to capture as much PR as possible to increase rank seems logical. Unfortunately, that's not a correct analogy. If you've just re-designed your site, it's likely that there are new problems created you're unaware of. Or, also likely is that - depending on how new your site is - Google's system hasn't finished fully evaluating it. It's normal for a redesigned website to see some rank fluctuations over the course of several days (or even a week or two) while it is in various stages of being indexed in ranked.

Do not use ""style='display: none'" to hide links. This is cloaking in its most basic and easily detectable form, and whether you mean well or not, Google can't detect your intentions - so don't expect them to.

TL;DR I would recommend you re-evaluate the rest of your site first, your competitors, and link situation before worrying about too many links on your main nav bar as it's usually not the issue.