Stop Google seeing/crawling links

[Case]

Is there a way to stop Google seeing/crawling links?

I have a whole bunch of links in the header navigation to my site that are great for usability but it means any page on my site can have around 200 links on it - most of which have nothing to do with the page you are currently browsing.

I have separate sidebar navigation on the site containing links relevant to the category you are in, so hopefully crawling wouldn't be an issue. I'd just like to remove this main header navigation from Google's eyes.

I was thinking of putting it in a flash file. Can Google crawl this?

[RawRob]

Just add

rel="nofollow"

to the link eg

<a href="index.htm" rel="nofollow">your link</a>

which means that search engines should not follow that link.

No need to complicate things by adding Flash.

Rob

[Case]

I don't think nofollow is as useful as it once was. I imagine Google will still register the fact there are 200+ links on the page, thus making the remaining links less effective.

I dunno if what I'm trying to do is viewed as "blackhat" though.

[RedEvo]

I dunno if what I'm trying to do is viewed as "blackhat" though.

Showing people one thing and Google another is generally labelled as black hat.

d

[Case]

Would an iframe do it?

[LOS Design UK]

Showing people one thing and Google another is generally labelled as black hat.

d

seconded.

Just one thing, It may sound like a good access move to you but to me it sounds like a navigation akin to trying to navigate around the outskirts of Birmingham.

Is it the page/site in your profile?

Do not want to do you an injustice without seeing it in action and no...iFrame is NOT the way to go IMHO.

[Case]

We've not got a live version up yet, this is for a new design.

The most similar example is johnlewis.com

[London Investigator]

Just add

rel="nofollow"

to the link

I wish when you get the warning about links the forum software didn't loose your post. Very annoying.

Anyway, as I've just written, nofollow is more for page ranking - google will still follow a link with a no follow tag.

you'd be better off with a robots text file, create a text file called robots.txt in the root of your website and add the following to it;

User-agent: *
Disallow: /your private directory/

For more info search for post 40360 in the google webmasters area, I would post a link to it but...

Hope this was a help and worth typing out twice

[Case]

Using this method, would all my url's need to be changed to:

http://www.domain.com/your-private-d.../normal-url...

?