On my site: http://www.dogflu.ca the panel of links on the left hand side can be shown or not shown. I realize on the home page they kinda need to be there, but for pages on the inner parts of my site, would I gain from a seo point of view, if I removed that panel from showing? I'm thinking if I do this, making that panel of links only appear on the home page, the only content that will show on the inner pages, is my top navigation bar and key word rich content, minus all of those links. Opinions?
No, it would mess up the architecture of the site, essentially making it more difficult for the bots to crawl deeper pages. It also won't do much from an SEO standpoint anyway. The engines can recognize what is a navigational element and discount that area anyway. This is called shingling or clustering analysis.
i do realize that it would make it harder for bots to crawl effectively, I've just hear to do both, so thought I'd post a thread here and see what you guys think...