Two Pics, one bit of Text single anchor link?

[BM7]

Hi thereGurus, sorry Aspirants  ;-),

I have a really nice looking menu used in my standard page template that has some SEO issues now due to possibly causing 'too many onsite links' penalty/downgrade on some of my bigger pages going >120 links. Wanting to keep the nice menu, I want to work around the issues if possible.

The menu is comprised of 7 buttons with various keywords pertinent to the site.  On the menu, hovering over the keyword in a button eg 'Technology' causes this button with word inside to do an animated slide down and a picture representative of 'Technology' to appear where the button was with the original button directly below it, which then a side menu slides out of to the right to reveal 5 anchor links that represent the 'Technology' menu category. The first option in this sub-menu is supposed to have the same anchor link as the description image and the button/button text that being it is like a category description.

Trouble I am having is that the slide out menu requires a separate div for javascript reasons. I have one anchor covering the button and the pop-up image, but then I need a second anchor for the first line of the slide out menu (otherwise fails W3C).

This is adding 7 duplicate anchors to the page on a e-Commerce page that already has too many anchors IMHO.

I read in HTML5 you can have an anchor holding a div inside, but how about an un'd  div? The next four items on the slide out menu go to other anchor links so it first anchor needs to end prior to these, hence halfway through a div.

Is there another way of making multiple items (across div boundaries etc) only go to/count as one single anchor link?

Thanks for your help,

Brad

[AlanBleiweiss]

Someone here may know, however this question is more for a programmer rather than fitting in the "technical SEO issues" or "advanced SEO" categories.  So I suggest reaching out to programmers who understand SEO as your outreach to get this resolved.

[RobertFisher]

BM7

This really is what Alan says, but the good news is there is help available . I will ask our VP of dev in the a.m. for the answer. I will have him PM you from here as he doesn't have an account. He is a master of these type issues. Or you can PM me with an email address and I will have him reach out to you.

Best,

Robert