I suspect I am getting somewhat slapped by the SE's for duplicate content in my templates. There are lots of internal links listed on each page. I am looking into several options: 1. Javascript menus - but I've heard that the SE's can now index JS 2. Use of "text" images in menus instead of text. 3. Use of iframes Do the SE's just look at the anchor text, or also the destination URLs and the "title" property in the links? Thanks!
If you have cookie cutter pages... for example, a template that generates pages for every <city>, <state> combination by simply substituting the city and state names at various places throughout the page then YES! Your pages will likely be drastically devalued. Evenif you get away with it for a while, if a Google Quality Rater stumbles upon your page in the SERPs or if someone reports you for doorway pages and Google manually reviews your URLs, your pages will likely get flagged by them as spam or not useful and will be buried in the SERPs. However, if by templates you mean that you use a template to render a header, footer, left navigation, maybe a sidebar or two... but you have a center body portion of every page that is unique... then this is perfectly OK. This is the case w/ almost ALL blogs. Yet they rank great. Don't worry about duplicate content in these types of templates. If this were a problem, practically every page on the web would experience the same problem. Your templates might have the same header, footer, and possibly sidebars... but the SEs are good at figuring out what part of the page is the template and what part of page contains the "real" content for the page. IMO all three options you listed are a bad idea. Stick to text links for site navigation in your templates. They're important to providing signals to the engines as to which pages are most important on your site... and for crawlability.