What is the best way to hide duplicate, image embedded links from search engines?

[Eric_R]

**Hello!

Hoping to get the community’s advice on a technical SEO challenge we are currently facing.  [My apologies in advance for the long-ish post.  I tried my best to condense the issue, but it is complicated and I wanted to make sure I also provided enough detail.]

Context: I manage a human anatomy educational website that helps students learn about the various parts of the human body.  We have been around for a while now, and recently launched a completely new version of our site using 3D CAD images.  While we tried our best to design our new site with SEO best practices in mind, our daily visitors dropped by ~15%, despite drastic improvements we saw in our user interaction metrics, soon after we flipped the switch.

SEOMoz’s Website Crawler helped us uncover that we now may have too many links on our pages and that this could be at least part of the reason behind the lower traffic.  i.e. we are not making optimal use of links and are potentially ‘leaking’ link juice now.

Since students learn about human anatomy in different ways, most of our anatomy pages contain two sets of links:

1. Clickable links embedded via JavaScript in our images.  This allows users to explore parts of the body by clicking on whatever objects interests them.  For example, if you are viewing a page on muscles of the arm and hand and you want to zoom in on the biceps, you can click on the biceps and go to our detailed biceps page.

2. Anatomy Terms lists (to the left of the image) that list all the different parts of the body on the image.  This is for users who might not know where on the arms the biceps actually are.  But this user could then simply click on the term “Biceps” and get to our biceps page that way.

Since many sections of the body have hundreds of smaller parts, this means many of our pages have 150 links or more each.  And to make matters worse, in most cases, the links in the images and in the terms lists go to the exact same page.

My Question: Is there any way we could hide one set of links (preferably the anchor text-less image based links) from search engines, such that only one set of links would be visible?  I have read conflicting accounts of different methods from using JavaScript to embedding links into HTML5 tags.  And we definitely do not want to do anything that could be considered black hat.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts!

Eric**

[CleverPhD]

The drop in your site traffic may be due to a number of things, not just links on the page.  If you restructured your URLs, changed title tags, etc etc. There can be lots of reasons besides number of links on the page.  You now have a new site that Google is trying to sort out and so you may simply have a little drop in the SERPs.

If you have the tools, look and see if your ranking did drop and monitor that.  Also use your analytics to see where the drop is coming from.

There are a couple of good posts on SEOMoz that have info on the 100 page link rule

http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-can-i-reduce-the-number-of-links-on-a-page-and-keep-the-site-easy-to-navigate

http://www.seomoz.org/q/can-i-reduce-link-count-by-no-following-links