Google said that low-quality pages on your site may affect rankings on other parts

[badabing]

One of my sites got hit pretty hard during the latest Google update. It lost about 30-40% of its US traffic and the future does not look bright considering that Google plans a worldwide roll-out.

Problem is, my site is a six year old heavy linked, popular Wordpress blog. I do not know why the article believes that it is low quality.

The only reason I came up with is the statement that low-quality pages on a site may affect other pages (think it was in the Wired article).

If that is so, would you recommend blocking and de-indexing of Wordpress tag, archive and category pages from the Google index? Or would you suggest to wait a bit more before doing something that drastically.

Or do you have another idea what I could to do?

I invite you to take a look at the site www.ghacks.net

[IM_Learner]

I believe too much of ads and linking (internal as well as external) may be the probable cause. I suggest to submit your site @ http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=76830633df82fd8e&hl=en and wait for some time before indulging in some action

[rishil]

Are you syndicating the content for link building? Or are scrapers just pulling in your content?

On the note of tags and archives, in most cases this is best practice anyway. However it seems you may have been hit with the content udate, and as Shailendra suggests, you may want to get webmaster support people to look into your site.

Without a full analysis it is difficult to say what else is affecting your site.

[Gyi]

Depending on the nature and quality of your content, you may also want to consider removing article pages that might be hurting your domain.