Excessive navigation links

[boxcarpress]

I'm working on the code for a collaborative project that will eventually have hundreds of pages. The editor of this project wants all pages to be listed in the main navigation at the top of the site. There are four main dropdown (suckerfish-style) menus and these have nested sub- and sub-sub-menus. Putting aside the UI issues this creates, I'm concerned about how Google will find our content on the page. Right now, we now have over 120 links above the main content of the page and have plans to add more as time goes on (as new pages are created).

Perhaps of note, these navigation elements are within an html5

<nav>element:

<nav id="access" role="navigation">

Do you think that Google is savvy enough to overlook the "abundant" navigation links and focus on the content of the page below? Will the

<nav>element help us get away with this navigation strategy? Or should I reel some of these navigation pages into categories? As you might surmise the site has a fairly flat structure, hence the lack of category pages.</nav>

</nav>

</nav>

[CMC-SD]

I absolutely think the algorithm knows the difference between navigational content and true "body" content. If you're using

<nav>, you have nothing to worry about. Feel free to worry exclusively about the UX issues.</nav>

[Dr-Pete]

I'm going to disagree a bit. While I do think Google understands navigation links and generally views them a bit differently from contextual (on-page) links, there's still a fundamental problem of dilution. If you have 200 navigation links, you split your authority ("link juice") 200 ways, and you're treating the main pages, sub-pages, and sub-sub-pages as if they're all essentially equal from an SEO standpoint. If you prioritize everything, you prioritize nothing.

What this ultimately means is that you drive a bit more ranking power to your very long-tail pages but a lot less to your top-level pages. It's a balancing act and there's not one right answer, but generally this isn't going to be a good fit to your business goals.

I dig into it more in a post from last year:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many

Again, it's not a right-or-wrong thing, but a matter of prioritization. From what you're describing, I'm worried that this could expand to hundreds and hundreds of links, and on a new site that could spread your ranking power pretty thin.