Too many links?

[UltraZulu]

Hi

My website has a dropdown menu system which makes it very easy to navigate to the user. However, I built it with css and a list, which also makes each one of the 36 links crawlable by the bots.

My question is, should I really have that many links crawlable on every page or should I disable some of them?

[I, Brian]

It's not so much link numbers as much as how you aim to focus visitors around your site - at least for search engine purposes. This may help with some inspiration:

http://www.searchengineworld.com/engine/theme_pyramids.htm

[UltraZulu]

ok, so the fact that I have a minimum of 36 links on any given page will not matter. What about the 100 links per page limit?

[David Wallace]

What about the 100 links per page limit?
Are you referring to the Google guidelines on this? If so, keep in mind that this rule is only a guideline. Google and other search engines do not mind pages with lots of links so much but when the pages get past a certain file size, then some will stop crawling.

That being said, 36 links on each page is perfectly fine.

[tubanewsrose]

I recently had an interesting thing happen, which I think is proof of the acceptability of drop down menus. In order to clean up my list of navigation links on the left of my site, I installed a dynamic CSS based drop down menu which is completly JS-disabled and search engine friendly based on <li> and <ul> list items. Yahoo and MSN have even cached the titles of the links as content which works out to be a good thing, many of the links in my drop down menu are keywords that bring users to my site. Google has been smart enough to not cache them, but certain pages are accessible only through this menu and they have been found by G- I'm 100% sure that it's SE friendly.

Anyway....shortly after I installed this menu, the toolbar PR's of many of my pages went away to grey. (I realize that the toolbar PR is becoming irrelevant but it's still an indicator of change and movement). Naturally I was concerned, was google not following the links in my new menu or somehow penalizing the pages that were only accessible through it?

To my relief, a few days later, not only did the original toolbar PR's return, but some other sub-areas that are contained in my dynamic menu got slightly higher toolbar PR's...The result of the post-menu-installation shuffle was links to these sub-areas from every page on my site! Later that week I jumped about 10 spots in the rankings for certain keywords...maybe coincidence but also great. By adding these sub-areas (like specific sub-forums) to my toolbar, the search engines can see that they're important content areas.

Sorry for the long post, my conclusion is that my menu, which may have over 100 dynamic links on it, only helped the SE-friendlyness of my site. It also made my site less cluttered and easier to navigate for my users - and slick!

-Rose

[UltraZulu]

David, I was reffering to the guidelines yes.

My worry is arround my site being indexed. I launched my site over 2 months ago. Google found it after about 1 month and has only indexed 31 of my +/- 360 pages.

Yahoo had 66 pages indexed and 1 week ago showed only 1 page indexed. There is some penalty on it, I just dont know what yet.

I have 4 sitemap pages to list each of the 360 pages I have. I split the sitemap page in 4 because I was worried about the number of links on the page.

Rose, thanks for the comments, it does make me feel like I didnt waste my time with the proper css based menu system.

As it stands I am worried that my site is not being crawled properly. Why is it taking so long for it to be fully indexed or am I being unreasonable?