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Hey Damien, thanks for the response. Ya I had originally thought about no following one set of links but then found out what you just pointed out, that the nofollow doesn't work that way anymore. We actually have more links then that per page (that just happens to be a round number) but what I am trying to figure out is since about half of them are duplicates am I really losing anything? since they only link to about 50 unique pages are those pages being passed the same amount of juice as they would be if they were only being linked to once per page (instead of being linked to in the main nav and footer)?

I will take a stab at it and someone more knowledgeable than me can correct me if I am wrong :).

I would host the pictures on your own server and address the speed issues with caching, compression, etc. As long as the pictures are optimized for the web correctly you can mitigate the cost in speed and gain the opportunity to be able to control your image optimization plan.

Right now your links point out and are not descriptive of the content at all. If they were hosted on your site you are referencing your own domain and can control the URL much easier. Instead of the link you currently have you could have a specific url that describes the picture (www.example.com/photos/Rafael-Nadal-wimbledon-2011.jpg). Please note that I am no tennis expert so this is just an example :). this would give you a descriptive url that points to your site, and by optimizing the alt and title tags you tell the search engines what your image is about. When those picture are indexed and show up in google or bing it is your site that gets the traffic and credit not a 3rd party host.

Hope that helps, personally as searching trends towards more visual cues I want to make sure that any pictures that are found of our products are optimized fully and point to our site.

Thanks for posting. I understand what chapter four says but it doesn't seem to answer my question. My understanding is that google only counts the first link on a page when passing link juice although it splits link juice across all of the links on a page. So according to this understanding only the navigation contained in the dropdowns at the top of the page will pass link juice, thus only half of the possible link juice is passed since the links in the footer don't pass any juice (even though they are factored in to how much juice each link passes). Is that a correct understanding?  The example in the book does not discuss what happens to how link juice is calculated and passed when two links on one page point to the same subpage.

Hey All, I am trying to understand link juice as it relates to duplicate navigation

Take for example a site that has a main navigation contained in dropdowns containing 50 links (fully crawl-able and indexable), then in the footer of said page that navigation is repeated so you have a total of 100 links with the same anchor text and url. For simplicity sake will the link juice be divided among those 100 and passed to the corresponding page or does the "1st link rule" still apply and thus only half of the link juice will be passed?

What I am getting at is if there was only one navigation menu and the page was passing 50 link juice units then each of the subpages would get passed 1link juice unit right? but if the menu is duplicated than the possible link juice is divided by 100 so only .5 units are being passed through each link. However because there are two links pointing to the same page is there a net of 1 unit?

We have several sites that do this for UX reasons but I am trying to figure out how badly this could be hurting us in page sculpting and passing juice to our subpages.

Thanks for your help! Cheers.