Can Discussion Content Overwhelm A Site?

[rogerd]

This may be a problem others have confronted... A year ago, I launched a site that was content-rich: lots of topical articles, essays, and other unique, high quality content.

Mindful of the need (both for SEs and human visitors) to keep adding content, I also added a blog-based content manager (to allow the site principals to keep adding new articles) and a discussion forum.

The site has prospered from a traffic standpoint, particularly with Google's deep linking. Rightly so, IMHO, since the content is better and deeper than most other sites in its category. With growing traffic, the discussion forum has hit critical mass and is now adding dozens of new pages to the site daily.

The discussion is all on-topic, but I'm concerned that what was originally a small fraction of the total site content is becoming the the largest area. As discussion continues to accelerate, the addition of discussion pages will greatly outstrip the addition of other content.

Should I worry about this? My site navigation still favors the major topics with articles and the like, and these have high PR. Google seems to be doing a good job of keeping things straight so far, but I'm concerned about reaching the point when my non-discussion content is less than 10% of the total. Comments?

[mivox]

Well, I see two choices right off the bat: Accept that people seem to find the site a good place to hang out, and nurture the whole conversation/discussion site angle. Think of the site as a teenager who is starting to devlop their personlity/life goals in a way you might not have expected. "Oh, you want to be a Kindergarten teacher instead of a Neurosurgeon? Hmm... OK."

Or, find a way to set the site up so that discussions are closed down after a certain period of time. Maybe each new article has a related discussion which is only open for 10 days after publication, or 30 days, or whatever. That would limit the discussion relative to the volume of non-discussion content, but if you keep adding new content frequently enough it would hopefully keep your loyal visitors coming back with frequent new topics to discuss.

<added>If you're primarily concerned about the SEs possibly thinking the discussions are 'watering down' your site's relevance to your target search phrases, you could always just set up the discussion pages to not be indexable...</added>

[ciml]

For Google rankings, I wouldn't worry about watering down theme yet. Theme in Google only seems to carry one link, even then it only seems to include text in or near the link.

I'm sure this will change, it might be worth looking at how Teoma works for an insight into something a bit more context sensitive.

[rogerd]

I guess I'll leave well enough alone for now, although either pruning irrelevant threads or preventing them from being spidered are good options. I'm doing a bit of manual tweaking, too - a thread titled "Need Help ASAP" is useless to both visitors and spiders, compared to "Keyphrase Help Needed".