duplicate links to subdomain hurting SEO

Question

I have a main site, http://hollywoodnose.com and http://forum.hollywoodnose.com. What I was doing was showing the 8 most recent forum posts in the right column of http://hollywoodnose.com. In my Google Webmasters account for the forum subdomain it shows 300+ incoming links fromt the main domain. Obviously it sees every page as in incoming link. Since then my traffic is literally cut in half. I've removed the recent forum posts fromt the main domain and guess I can only wait now.

This seems really odd to me that this would happen. I still have a link in the nav bar of the main domain to the forum and one in the footer. Will the same thing (duplicate links) happen or will I have to remove these two links or possibly set them to rel="nofollow"? Would that make it seem like spam? How do I handle this situation and has anyone ever dealt with something like this? Thank you.

Answer 1

Linking to your forum on every page in your site won't get you into any kind of trouble SEO-wise. That's normal for important parts of a website and site navigation. So don't change this or set them to nofollow (which should never be used for internal links).

I'd be surprised if the most recent forum posts on your home page caused your issue at least as a duplicate content issue. Duplicate content only becomes a problem when it's many page of a website being duplicated. This is just part of one page displaying parts of others.

Have you checked your site analytics to see exactly how your search results were affected? What search terms changed, if any? Have you confirmed it is a search ranking drop and not a loss of traffic from elsewhere?