Secondary Menu - nofollow or other strategy?

[Motava]

We have a "secondary main menu" on a site that displays some popular pages of the site. They are in the main navigation of the site as subpages but we wanted to highlight them on every page of the site through this secondary menu. so this secondary menu is the same on every page of the site.

So we have the main menu on the top of the site, subpages on the left and this secondary menu below the subpages (in a blue box so they stand out).

Is this secondary menu confusing for the structure of the site or negative at all (in relation to robots, not UX)? Should we nofollow these links in the secondary menu?

thanks for replies!

[EGOL]

Should we nofollow these links in the secondary menu?

In my opinion, definitely not.  If you nofollow them then the pagerank that would have flowed into them will be lost.  If you keep these links on your site let the power flow into them.

[Motava]

Thanks EGOL, so you see no disadvantage to having this secondary menu?

[EGOL]

I can't say for sure because I am not familiar with the site.

I have secondary menus in the side navigation of a couple of my own sites and visitors click on them.  On one site about 30% of the homepage clicks are on a secondary menu located near the bottom of the page (a popular free resource that brings in a lot of organic traffic but does not produce revenue).

[KT684]

Motava, here's a video where Matt Cutts discuses the nofollow attribute on internal links.  Generally I'd agree with EGOL and say it's a bad idea to place nofollow tags on pages that you do want followed in other locations.

You could get fancy and place the links in a subfolder restricted by a robots.txt file and generate them via ajax or javascript, but that's probably not worth the added effort.

[Motava]

good video!

Definitely going with regular links for this secondary menu