Ever Wise to Intentionally Use Javascript for Global Navigation?

[mrwestern]

I may be going against the grain here, but I'm going to throw this out there and I'm interested in hearing your feedback...

We are a fairly large online retailer (50k+ SKUs) where all of our category and subcategory pages show well over 100 links (just the refinement links on the left can quickly add up to 50+). What's worse is when you hover on our global navigation, you see the hover menu (bot sees them as

• ) of over 80 links.

  Now I realize the good rule of thumb is not to exceed 100 links on a page (and if you did your math, you can see we already exceeded that well before we let the bots get to the good stuff we really wanted them to crawl in the first place).

  So...

  Is it wise to intentionally shield these global nav links from the bots by using javascript?

[matbennett]

I had this same conversation with someone yesterday about a very similar set-up.

In a 2009 blog post, Matt Cutts said that the main reason not to include over 100 links was for user experience. It used to be for technical reasons, but those no longer apply.  Here is the post: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-many-links-per-page/

Lots of links can lead to lots of code, which slows things down. It will also be dividing up the page rank fairly heavily. However in the age of mega-menus I don't think that the number of links is, in itself, a problem.

Just for reference (and the answers to your situation may be different) our conversation about this ended with the decision to reduce the number slightly - structuring to leak less page rank to unimportant pages. However overall we still have a LOT of links and are happy with that.