Nofollow in global navigation?

[jg100]

Currently planning our site architecture and little confused over the management of our global navigation

To benefit from the maximum link juice to our 50-100 most important pages we are going to incorporate links to these from our homepage as part of the global navigation.

Now I understand we want nice, flat architecture; however; on these sub pages we may one day want to place another 100 of so links on these to another category level.

The problem I see arising is if we already have a bunch of links as part of our global navigation we are going to dilute the links on any sub category pages.

Now Im guessing the solution to is nofollow the global navigation on all pages other than the homepage? or do the bots recognize a global navigation as such and is able to handle this issue already?

Thanks for everyones help.

[SteveOllington]

NoFollowing internal links won't save you any link juice... Rand did a WBF on it here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-how-do-we-plug-the-nofollow-leak

You're far better off going broad to narrow with your menu and trying to incorporate the pages those hundreds of links go to into categories and sub-categories, so try to combine what those pages are about in the main nav and then give options to go into more detail once users are within the category area (not of the main nav).

[jg100]

Thanks for the reply;

I'm not sure I understand correctly or that I have explained myself very well!

So we're saying information should be placed into categories with related info placed into sub-categories; which we can all agree with.

My issue is category pages that will link to these related sub-categories will also have the global navigation links on also (or are we saying to remove it here?), and end up with too many links that become diluted?

[SteveOllington]

Hiya, no it's fine to keep the global nav on all pages... you should do anyway. What I mean is, trim the number of links in that global nav down by placing some of them only within their category areas instead, in a secondary menu maybe. But... you can still use flyouts in the main menu so that the menu items are listed and then a hover-over of a category brings out more items, and again for a sub-category, etc... in which you could use a technology which isn't crawl-able/followed. That way users can still access all menu items from the main nav but Google will only see the top level links, with further links not followed (without using NoFollow) and bypassed. Not sure the best way to do it though since JS and Ajax are by all accounts a lot more crawl-able now.