Reducing number crawl-able links?

[AJPro]

Hello,

I just like to ask for best practice when it comes to reduce number of internal links on a site with a mega menu.

Since the mega menu lists all categories and all their subcategories it creates a problem when all categories are linking to all categories directly..

Would the method below reduce the number of links and preventing the link juice flowing directly from category to category?

[(link built with JavaScript and the html5 "data-" attribute)

Thinking of using these links to categories in the menu not directly below the parent category.](#)

[PaddyDisplays]

So you think these would hide these links from goggle's bot, but will be usable for the end user?

I know the "no follow" link sculpting does not work, and I'm sure google would be switched on to tricks to hide links to sculpt.  If the trick does work, its the type of thing google does not want you to do, so I wouldn't do it incase I get punished by google down the line.  (maybe I missunderstand what your trying to do).

I'm not familiar with that type of link, so I don't know if it would work on a technical level.

[Dr-Pete]

I haven't seen this solution in play, but I'd be cautious. It's a bit gray, at best. Google is okay with AJAX-driven menus, for example, and often won't crawl them, but this adaptation of HTML5 is kind of cheating the attributes of a link, and that could get you into trouble. Google may just outright crawl them anyway.

Truthfully, the data on mega-menu usability is really mixed. People often find them much less useful than webmasters and business owners think they are. Many people never see them at all. I think  you should really consider your information architecture and whether even having mega-menus is useful. When you make everything important, each thing becomes less important, both for people and for Google.

[AJPro]

Makes sense, I absolutely don't want to chance with the menu and have it mistaken for cloaking. We will now look at other solutions for a more traditional menu with better internal linking and less links.

Thank you for your input!