Too many forum pages causing drop in rank?

Site did exceptionally well for 4 years until now.

[Susanne]

I manage a site that hasn't grown much in the past 4 years. It's been on top of search engines for all desired key phrases and we have all been happy! However, the forum we run is growing and growing and by now the number of forum pages far outweigh the number of real content pages.

I noticed that in the last Google update we suddenly dropped dramatically for most of our main phrases. I have a feeling it is due to the site now being diluted due to the number of forum pages.

Has anybody else experienced a similar situation? Does this theory make sense or should I look for other reasons for the sudden drop?

[helleborine]

We're all scrambling to try to figure out "what have we done this time to incur the wrath of Google."

I have a forum, and though it's part and parcel of the navigation on my site (there's a link to it on every page), it's hosted on a different server, and has a different domain name.

My site stil sank like a rock.

[kamikaze Optimizer]

Hi Susanne:

I do not think that is your issue. I also have a forum within my site. It is very much part of the main navigation, and the forum content far out weighs the remainder of the site.

Although I am seeing a "little" drop for internal results, the site in general is performing very well.

If you would like to sticky me your site url, I would be happy to look at it.

[Marketing Guy]

I do not think that is your issue. I also have a forum within my site. It is very much part of the main navigation, and the forum content far out weighs the remainder of the site.

I'm in the same situation - seeing no drop in results (some improvments).

[Atomic]

Ditto for me. Large forum completely integrated into my site and we have steadily improved even through Bourbon.

[caveman]

Susanne, perhaps a site structure issue? Internal linking or site set up? That's usually where I start looking when someone describes a situation like you describe. Maybe look at dup issues of various sorts also.

[webman]

I also have a forum on my website that far outweighs the number of content pages on my site. It seems to have helped my homepage page rank and SERP visibility immensely over the past 1 1/2 years. However, after this update I seem to rank better for my top keywords but for some reason overall traffic has dropped quite a bit.

[Atomic]

However, after this update I seem to rank better for my top keywords but for some reason overall traffic has dropped quite a bit.

Hmmm, I have to say that I have noticed this as well. It's not a huge drop and may be seasonal but it's a good 10-20% drop.

[Susanne]

A lot of interesting ideas. Thanks a lot.

Caveman, I do have a few new pages that I forgot to put in the site-map and they are only reachable from ONE other page in the site. Will try to clean up a bit. But why could something like that cause this drop....?

Webman, interesting u say that. This site was a PR6 but as soon as the forum started to grow it dropped to a 5. I always thought it was due to the fairly useless links to the home page from every single forum page. But ranking remained on top!

Was told in a sticky that having links to Amazon can greatly hurt a site. I have had the links for 4 years, they are NOT iframes, just normal layers like the rest of the site. What are your opinions on Amazon links?