I'm trying to understand what is best practice for rendering large quantity of navigation links.
If a site has 100+ categories in a menu system each containing a link to the category (placed within a HTML5 nav tag), would this be considered optimal for SEO purposes even though it could extend the total links per page beyond 200?
I've noticed some sites loading the category menu via Ajax, with just the top level categories loaded within the main HTML. The top level category pages then link to their sub-categories, so the whole structure is still there and all pages are stated within the sitemap; just not spammed on every page.
Does anyone have any experience on which method is more effective?
I guess I'm worried that the odd one or two links within the main content start to lose their importance, even though they would be the most important links on the page.