What is the best way to pass link juice?

[MountainMedia]

We have an e-commerce site that, according to Moz, has too many on page links. The main navigation has top level links and about 45 sub-category links. Our question is -- Should we keep the main navigation and top level categories as do follow and change the sub-category navigation to no follow?

Or, should we make the top level categories no follow and keep the sub-category navigation do follow?

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi James,

I would never advise that you no-follow internal navigation links to primary pages (main or sub-cat). To things like the contact page, that is fine, but remember that Google wants to be able to navigate cleanly around your site. There are times when you would want to no-follow paginated pages, but this isn't in every circumstance.

Beyond this, it is a little awkward to advise too much more as I would need to be looking at site hierarchy and architecture in more detail.

-Andy

[ThompsonPaul]

Fully agree with Andy. You have a site architecture challenge that absolutely cannot be addressed with no-follow. That's not what no-follow is intended for.

Paul

[TakeshiYoung]

Definitely don't use nofollow. Using nofollow won't solve the problem of having too many links, and will just end up hurting your site. It is almost never a good idea to use nofollow on internal links.

What you should consider instead is to have navigation that changes in response to what section of the site the user is in. For example, if the user is in the automotive category, it makes sense to have links to tires and oil, but it's not necessary to link to a subcategory for perfume. Having contextual navigation is great from an SEO perspective, and also provides for a better user experience of not overwhelming the user with a hundred choices.

That being said, limiting a site to having 100 links per page is a very old Google recommendation and is not a hard and fast rule. Having a lot of links on a page makes it more difficult for Google to crawl and dilutes the link juice on a page, but is sometimes necessary. Amazon.com, for example, has 300+ per page. How many links Google is willing to crawl is a factor of your site's Pagerank.