Added forum to company site, now rankings are terrible!!

I recently added a webmaster forum to our company website and our rankings have dropped. We ranked well in google and yahoo for the term "new jersey web design" and now we're ranking terrible. Our site went from about 50 pages to now over 800. I'm thinking our PR is being bled because the forum pages do not have a PR yet, but wat about google??? Anyone have any ideas on this issue???

What particular page was ranking well for "new jersey web design"?...I am guessing your home. Were any other changes made?

If not, your positioning is probably just flucuating. I would be patient and see if you pop back up.

No pages were changed at all. Only the forum was added.

It may just be fluctuating. I would just be patient for awhile and see if it comes back. Every once in awhile Ill have a client's keyword that will drop for no reason and come back a few weeks later.

If this is the case I cannot imagine that simply adding a forum is the cause of your rankings drop.

I am guessing that your site is not as established as you think. you may have experienced a temporary boost for your term "new jersey web design". It happens for some new sites for their terms, up they go and down they come. Then they websites will stay there for a long while..

how long has your term been in good rankings for?
how many PR updates exactly? 1 ?

ADding forums pages normally doesnt reduce pagerank, only in some exceptional cases when adding new pages has a negative effect on the PR.

Hello,

I can see you have used PHPBB forums and done mod_rewrite too. That means Your links have been added to PR0 pages which be be the cause of declining that. If that is the only reason u will get back soon or even better PR as ur forum has SE friendly URL's

Next I can see is your robots.txt file where u disallowed a number of things and uses a wild card to call the robots. Please check that, What I think disallowing the CGIBIN and any search robote will will help, as u have coverted the URL's

There may be possible loss of some backlinks u may have previously.

Overall your site is excellant and more SE friendly.

If I understand you correctly, you're saying that linking to a site from a bunch of PR0 pages with bring its rankings down? I don't think that's correct.

yeah what he said is totally not true.
this whole thread is misleading, even the title.

I think we all know PR0 pages linking to you inst going to do any harm.

how is PR 0 pages going to harm your site at all?
i believe linking to banned sites will, not pr 0 sites.

It's not going to do you any harm, but I wouldn't recommend linking with PR 0 sites, jsut because they will give you very little benefit...in the beginning anyway.

Well, all of us except for siplnettech


I don't mind linking with PR0's at all. Eventually most of them will have higher PR anyway.

I agree with you, but if I have a Link's Page with a Pagerank of 5, and I want a max of 30 links to a page, I am in no way going to exchange links with sites that have a Pagerank of 0, when I can find other, more beneficial sites.

I agree with your point of view vetofunk. It really depends on who you want to link to actually. having a links page with limited links, you will definitely not want to link up cuz you have limit links.

If the site is pr 0, you can opt not to link to it or link to it. Ultimately, it is up to individual. But, I would link to PR 0 site if it has potential and growing good resources. it may boost my site up in future.

just my 2 cents.

// quite related to this topic:: I just came out of seo guy forum. some bitch was giving a troll comment that she doesnt link to unknown sites. all she had to do was to point out that his site was un-cached but she didnt. why cant she just say that she wants linking to PR sites? lol. its so simple, rather than beating abt the bush.