Still too many internal links reported on page

[TheUniqueSEO]

Hi Guys

I am new here, and very much learning a lot, and enjoying the benefits of being an SEOMoz user.

So here goes with my first question (probably of many).

I have known for sometime that our website has a top heavy number of links in the primary navigation.  But I wasn't too sure how important this was.  Our main objective was to make an east to use nav for customers.  All of the feedback we have had says that customers really like our navigation, as it is easy to use etc etc.

However, when running an SEOMoz campaign on our site, again we got back that there are too many links on the pages.  Example, home page has 500+ links.

So I decided to do something about this.  I have implemented what I think is a good solution where by the drop down navigation isn't loaded on first load.  If the user then hovers over one of our "departments" the sub navigation is loaded via Ajax and dropped in.  This means if the user wants it, they get it, if not then it's not loaded with the page.  My theory being that Google loads the page without all the links, but a user gets the links as and when they need them.

I tested with the SEOMoz toolbar and this tells me that when I load the home page there is 167 links in it vs 500+ previously.  However, the my campaign still tells me that my home page has 450+ links (and this is a recent crawl of the page).

Our site is here: www.uniquemagazines.co.uk

Can you tell me is what I have done is a) a good solution and b) does the SEOMoz crawler have the ability to trigger the hover event and cause the AJAX load of the sub navigation content?

[Andropenis_Australia]

Yes what you have done is good, although I am not sure about the moz bots capabilities for drop down crawling. I would say wait until your next crawl, and even then if it picks up the links don't worry about it too much, just do what you can do and stick with it if it's good for the user.

[TheUniqueSEO]

That's great thank you.

I don't want to get hung up on building a website which is good for Google, I want a website which is good for users, but of course I want to get as much benefit from Google as possible.

One aspect cutting out nearly 300 links has had is the site loads faster, which is good for users, so a great benefit there.

Thanks again.