Home page links -- Ajax When Too Many?

[friendoffood]

My home page has links to major cities.  If someone chooses a specific city I want to give them the choice to choose a suburb within the city,  With say 50 cities and 50 suburbs for each city that's 2500 links on the home page.  In order to avoid that many links on the home page (or any page) I would like to have just the 50 cities and pull up the suburbs as an ajax call that search engines would not read/crawl.  This would be better than clicking on a main city and then getting the city page which they then can choose a suburb.  Better to do it all at once.

Is it a bad idea to ajax the subregions on the home page and to code it so Google, Bing, other search engines don't crawl or even see anything on the home page related to the suburbs?  The search engines will still find the suburb links because they will be listed on each main city page.

[RyanPurkey]

As a crawl issue it should be fine as long as you're using a sitemap well and have a more static link structure one the more localized pages. You could also internally cross promote from time to time so that you have a neighborhood page being talked about on the home page as a great example of X, then you could have a neighborhood page from a different state/city talked about as a related Y on some of the deeper pages, if applicable.  Think of it as similar to how Amazon promotes other products as, "...people also bought" or LinkedIn with, "...people also viewed."  Cheers!

[friendoffood]

Thanks again Ryan!