Too many on page links on ecommerce site

[bhsiao]

I have an online store with 10 catagories, many of those have subcategories. I have a tree style navigation menu on the page. This helps people quickly find what they need. However, I end up with about 125 links on the page that way.

Does google really penalize me for this?

Is there anyway around this?

Advice much appreciated!

[EGOL]

Data is always better than opinions.

Create a drill down structure with category pages and test your conversion rate against the big navigation.

If the big navigation works I would keep the 125 links.  It's not that much more than the suggested 100 and you know that you are serving your visitors well (and your bottom line too).

[brycebertola]

There isn't a specific penalty, but you are diluting the flow of "link juice" by linking to everything from your homepage.

If you've ever heard of link scultping (a bruce clay technique), it might be of use here. Basically you have your top menu items as normal text links, and the lower levels are pulled in through javascript so the search engines don't spider them.

It gets a lot more complicated than that, but at least it will point you in the right direction.