Question for experienced SEOs

Hello!

Here is my problem:

My pages disappeared from Google search even though they were first - second on google.ca and I think I know why. Month ago I decided to change navigation on my site. My menu was in java script but I decided to change it to DHTML menu. Google can see links in DHTML menu while in Javascript no. So, suddenly my internal links increased from 15 to 95. Before there were also 95 links but google couldn't see 80 links.

Do you think that number of internal links per page is really important to Google???
What is the optimum number of internal links on one page?

Thanks in advance!!!
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Question off topic: Is there a problem if page links on itself?

It is important to the extent of transferring LJ around your site. If you have five links on a page each page you link to gets 1/5 of the juice if 10 then 1/10.
I hate questions like this they are so pointless. The more juice you have comming into your site the easier it becomes to rank more internal pages. The only optimal number of anything for google is when you come number one for your search terms than your page is properly optimized. if you are not number one then you are under optimised.....

No..

I'm not sure what you mean by changing your nav from JavaScript to DHTML. DHTML is HTML + JavaScript.

As to why you r pages dropped, who knows. Did you change the nav and then they dropped? Or did they drop and then you changed the nav? It's quite possible the 2 have nothing to do with one another.

Anyway, if your main nav is linking to the most important pages on your site with anchor text matching the primary keywords you are targeting for those pages, having the links by standard HTML is definitely a plus, not a minus. And if your main nav is not set up that way, it probably should be.

I agree with gazzahk, no such thing as an "optimial number of links per page". Link to everything important to link to from that page and nothing that is not. Link to the most important content from every page. Beyond that, there are a thousand different strategies, and which is best for you depends on the quantity and nature of your content, the number and competitiveness of your keywords and the user experience you are tying to create (something rarely discussed n SEO forums, but critical to a successful business of any sort.)

Just to make some things clear.

Google can see links in DHTML menu while in Javascript Google can't see links.

I switched to DHTML menu before drop cause I thought it'll help Google to crawl my site better.

So, before the change PAGE 1 linked to 7 (that Google see) and 80 (that visitors see) other pages.

After the change Google can see that PAGE 1 links to 87 other pages.

After that I disappeared from Google results.

about 20 days ago there were some changes in the SERPS for many pages, some up, so of course others went down. I heard that Google nullified some old penalties they had, maybe your site was part of this.

Some say to nofollow parts of your site to keep more "juice" near the top pages but I've had better luck personally by having as many pages indexed as possible.

Stop right there. As brandall says: DHTML utilizes javascript!!!

If you change in your navigation then it is possible to drop certain pages but change in just java script to DHTML it not possbile. it increase your page viewability.

That is the exact reason why I switched to DHTML. It increases page viewability.

So if Google sees that my page is suddenly more viewable than it was, could there be a problem???

So long as the link element isn't in the script... it's crawled...

The issue though the fact that you have 95 pages sharing the healthy anking needs of 15... it's obvious that those 15 pages get substantially less link juice to what they were use to and ecause there isn't enugh to go around pnthing comes back to the mainage which presumably was the page that had and lost the ranks.

Best bet... rel="nofollow" those 80 links off the mainpage and proportionally off each of the other 15 pages... (say 70 of the 80 are rel="nofollow" off each of the 15 pages in consecutive order.

It is possible that caused the problem, but I doubt it. How is it possible? Well, if all of your pages were indexed and showed links to only 8 pages, and now they show links to 87, the amount of PR passed to each page is about 1/10th what was being passed to the original 8 (actually, a little better than that because the 8o additional pages have more juice to point back to those original 8, but you get the point). So, you end out with more pages having more juice, but your original 8 having significantly less juice.

What PR has to do with ranking and why everybody is talking about link juice seo-for_fun is asking, why his pages disappeared from Google. I don't think Google will drop a website just because it can crawl more pages now. There must be some other reason.

His "disappeared from Google" isn't likely a suggestion that they were "delisted" -- more likely "I searched on keyphrases and couldn't find my pages."

At least that what I intrepreted from his post...

What the OP said he did should have made things better in any event.

Also I did a test a while abck that showed that Google can actually follow a few types of javascript links.

Here is the test

Spreading links juice around your site is a good thing.

There is likely some other reason that this happened.

Were any dead links created by accident?

Check the Cache of your page and check Google Webmaster Tools for errors.

I'm all for some magical, unexplained, totally illusive reason for this but in the absence of that...

"Spreading links juice around your site is a good thing." < < < I agree... but this is also a factor of competitive landscape...

If you prepare meals for 15 people each day and that's all you can comfortably feed and 80 new house guests come to live and bring nothing with them... and they all need a good regular supply of food... all 95 people will get really weak only eating 1/5th of their daily ration...

...your website will to. Too weak to keep competitors at bay!

Lots of guys are talking about PageRank. I don't think that page rank has to deal with position.

My page had PageRank 1/10 and it still has.

I removed 20 pages from menu and I'm waiting for Google to crawl my site.

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Since insertation of menu my position went down (from first page to 8th page) not PageRank.

There are 10 dead links in the menu.