Search Engines and multiple menus on pages

[thesoundsmith]

I have no idea where to place this post, could be HTML or JS or 'philosophy of web search'? Feel free to move it...I have an 80-page site with a typical design being the multilevel drop-down menu at the top along with a right-side submenu. To maintain visual consistency, if the page does not require use of one or more of the lower sections, I put links to other pages in these spaces. So any given page may have three or more links to the same HTML page, one in the top menu, one in the right-side menu, one in a different lower menu, and perhaps a reference in the body of the document. Search engine indexing (and I'm referring to PicoSearch site indexing service, not Google) winds up with multiple redundant links as a result (as I'm sure Google does as well, but that is not necessarily relevant here, I don't believe...)You can see the site at thesoundsmith.com, but for reference as an example page, look at this typical page. Then click on the Search option top right and try a search for "Dino". the results include many pages with the only reference being a link from the submenu section, making the idea of "searching for pages relevant to Dino" is pretty much a guessing game.Is there a way to make a part of an HTML page (perhaps/preferably a DIV or a UL element) invisible to search engine crawlers while leaving the main body accessible? These are template-based pages, pretty straight-forward third-party initial design. All I found on this site was this discussion, which implies this can't be done yet, if I understand. But if it CAN be, without resorting to bizarre solutions like image maps or graphical text, I'd love to know how.The biggest and most consistent easy-to-exclude element is the class "sidemenu", which is present on virtually all pages and is in every case a list of links that duplicate the top menu (except for the cellphone-to-YouTube links, which I can move.). Can I isolate this class (or ID if need be, there's only one per page) with .htaccess, or js, or some html command I am unaware of? Or are the only options to accept the duplicates or redesign?I found this article from Columbia University, but it seems to only be about Google, not the site-specific engines.Any thoughts and/or ideas appreciated.

[Synook]

Search engine indexing (and I'm referring to PicoSearch site indexing service, not Google) winds up with multiple redundant links as a result (as I'm sure Google does as well, but that is not necessarily relevant here, I don't believe...)

I don't quite see why that would be a problem... after all, the search engine indexes pages, not links.

[thesoundsmith]

I don't quite see why that would be a problem... after all, the search engine indexes pages, not links.

The site search engines (at least PicoSearch) creates an entry for each link. So the same link on a page three times creates three links to the same page with different headers, instead of one. If you click on one of those links you get to the right place, but for example, one search provided 67 entries for only 26 pages, and displayed 10 at a time. I have found the response for Picosearch, they have a Start/Stop indexing command to avoid things like PHP-built reuests from shopping carts, etc. This reduced the same search to 28 hits for the 26 pages, which is fine. And I don't mind if Google hits 67, that just helps drive traffic to the site. But i want my vievers to find what they wish easily (that's why all the menus.)I suppose some folks would prefer having all the duplicate links, I just want to make it simple... But I have it the way I need for now, thanks.

[knystrom18]

Create a site map? I think that if Google's crawlers find that, they only "find" the pages listed within, and don't duplicate anything if you don't duplicate anything. I don't know about Pico though...

[thesoundsmith]

Create a site map? I think that if Google's crawlers find that, they only "find" the pages listed within, and don't duplicate anything if you don't duplicate anything. I don't know about Pico though...

The site map/robots.txt files only work at the page level; Google has a similar Start-Stop indexing option, but I don't need it there. I do wish there were a "standard", though. One command to rule them all...