Pages too similar because of many navigation elements...

Hiya,

My site has a top menu with over 100 items in it and a side navigation with another 20 or so links. The content area is where pictures and comments show. This is the only part that is different on each page.

The problem is that this way, the pages look very similar even though each page has different images, descriptions and comments. The biggest part of the html code are still the menus, which makes the pages 70% similar according to some similar page testtool.

How to avoid this? Is there any way to tell the SE crawlers that the menus are on all pages and should not really count. But also, not exclude the menus from crawling because the spider still has to be able to reach all pages ofcourse.

Any ideas on this matter?

Regards

Will be very hard to navigate, if i visit your site and see those 100 links, I will be confused where to find information. Consider showing the most important part of the navigation, put other less important in your sitemap together with the most important ones. And use search box so that your users can immediately find information that they need.

Google technical guidelines of not exceeding more than 100 links per page is useful for site usability.

A top menu with more than a 100 links and 20 sidebar links on top of that. You are lucky that googlebot has actually found its way to the content of your site.

Technically, the search engine spider should actually be quite good at recognizing templates and focus on the content, but 120 links to get past first, isn't making your life easier.