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Thanks for the advice. You reminded me that I'm designing for the user, not the bots. I was just getting a little desperate because, no, our site, is not new--it's a PR4 site that's been online since 1998--but it's continuously dropping in Google. It's now one space from the bottom of the first page for the keyword "embroidered patches." We used to rule Google, so I'm just trying anything I can, while still being legit.

All the sites above us are pr1-3 sites, so I'm starting to wonder if something's wrong with the site itself, so I've been making tweaks.

It's www.stadriemblems.com in case anyone's curious.

To the spiders, would the content in the lightbox be considered on the page?

We are a custom patch company--we make patches for many different types of clients. I have a gallery of patches for almost every kind of client, and they all have their own pages. If I put navigation on the home page such as what I show below, will Google consider that to be too much?

Boy Scout Patches | Motorcycle Patches | Fire Patches | Police Patches | Military Patches | Sports Patches | Business and Organization Patches | Paintball Patches | Scooter Patches | In Memory Patches

They would all be links to different pages, and there would be literally 50-60 more!

Would it be better to remove the word patches from all of the links?

And then another question comes up: too many on-page links?

Thanks for that great information. This is a good example of what I'm taking about:

http://www.stadriemblems.com/scouting/neckerchiefs/index.htm

Under "Plain Neckerchief" click on "view pricelist" or "color chart"

So, you think a better practice would be to just include that pricelist on the same page instead?

Our site has about 1000 pages indexed, and the vast majority of them are not useful, and/or contain little content. Some of these are:

-Galleries
-Pages of images with no text except for navigation
-Popup windows that contain further information about something but contain no navigation, and sometimes only a couple sentences

My question is whether or not I should put a noindex in the meta tags.

I think it would be good because the ratio of quality to low quality pages right now is not good at all.

I am apprehensive because if I'm blocking more than half my site from Google, won't Google see that as a suspicious or bad practice?