Would nofollowing the footer throw an unnatural blance between followed and nofollowed links?

[smilingbunny]

I have been getting errors for too many on-page links. All the major navigation pages are found in links within the navigation tabs and are identical to the footer links. So my question is, would nofollowing the footer look unnatural and throw off the balance between followed and nofollowed links on the site and negatively effect SEO?

[john4math]

My advice is to not nofollow any internal links.  It burns your link juice; it no longer sculpts it.  If you really don't want the page it's going out to indexed, either exclude it in your robots.txt, or even better, stick a meta noindex tag on it.

[smilingbunny]

Thanks for the reply. To clarify, we're not trying to hide the page, we're trying to reduce the number of on-page links as to not overly exceed the recommended 100.

Since we already have these links within our navigational tabs at the top of the page, we're not sure if it would be useful to no-follow the footer links to reduce the number of total links on the page. However, I don't want the page to look unnatural by having an unruly balance of no followed to followed links.

[john4math]

My instincts say I'd rather exceed the 100 links than trying to get the count down by nofollowing footer links, but I've never had this issue before so I can't say for sure.  Google may follow nofollowed links, so I have a feeling this doesn't really get the link count down in Googlebots eyes.

[smilingbunny]

Thanks again John!

[Dr-Pete]

I think John is spot on, but just wanted to add a couple of things:

(1) The 100-link "rule" is really just a guideline. Adding nofollow wouldn't impact how we count or, likely, how Google counts. Nofollows still dilute link-juice.

(2) If the footer links duplicate main-navigation links, then they may not be counted at all. Google discounts any additional links to Page B from Page A, and will more or less ignore them.