Solutions for too many on-page links?

[unikey]

We have just begun using SEO Moz a few months ago and have been busy cleaning up some of our warnings and errors. One of the errors that has been an issue is ... too many on-page links. I am trying to correct this issue and I am wondering how seo moz counts these links. For instance... we have links to many of our product categories in a drop down from our main menu, those same links are listed in our footer. Does this get counted as two or only one link. If two, should we make one of the link no follow or how would you best suggest correcting this. Our website is www.unikeyhealth.com

Since the menu and the footer appear on virtually every page on our site correcting this issue will quickly sort out this problem. Thanks for any advice.

[TakeshiYoung]

The PageRank of a page is split between every link on a page. That means that every link on a page lowers the value of every other link on the page (from an SEO perspective). Having more links also makes it more difficult for Google to crawl your site.

The general recommendation is 100 links per page. I counted 177 on your site. 100 is not a hard rule, but generally you want to keep that number fairly low.

When counting links, every "a href" is counted as a separate link, regardless if the destination is the same page. So having the same link in the footer and header counts as 2 links. Nofollowing your links will not do anything to solve this problem, only physically removing your links will.

Now, having a lot of links is not the end of the world, but the question you want to ask is whether having all those links is actually helping your users. I would invest in a user tracking tool such as CrazyEgg or ClickTale, and see how people are actually using your site.

Do people really select "Osteo-Key" from your massive drop-down menu? Maybe the better experience would be to just present the top-level categories, so that people aren't overwhelmed by all the options. How many people actually click the 40+ links you have in your footer? If it's a small amount, then removing them is probably a better user experience and will help SEO as well. Also, having 200 links on a product page is overkill.

From a conversion optimization standpoint, presenting the users with as few options as possible while giving them the capability to find anything they're looking for results in the least confusion and the most conversions. Usable web design lies in finding that balance.

[unikey]

Thanks Takeshi, you make some valid points. Makes sense to me.