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I just want to make myself a little bit clearer here. While I appreciate any advice on why the site's rankings might be (mildly) affected, I am more interested in finding out why the site might have been penalized (which is most probably the case). Here are my suspicions: I had three articles that were 45% duplicate - thanks to one of my writers, may he rest in peace ;)), but they were removed/rewritten 2 months ago I had a guy build some links for me about a year ago and he set up a link wheel without my consent, so the link profile might be a problem (too many similar links?) Duplicate content because same article exists on my site with different URLs? Too many links from main page (as suggested by your colleague, although I doubt very much that this can cause a penalty) Panda related - although my content is of good quality Site structure for the multiple languages (.net for german is one Joomla installation, and the other /xlang/ is a separate Joomla install where I use Joomfish for the various translation Any ideas?

It's complicated, but Istvan hit the core point. More links per page means each link gets less link-juice. Of course, it also means that more pages get link-juice, so it's a balancing act. I wrote about the "100 link rule" last year: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many There's no one "right" number, and 100 isn't a hard cut-off, it's just a matter of prioritizing. I am worried that your link menus with long article names aren't very user-friendly. I'm guess that people just use the main menus and don't navigate the drop-downs. From an SEO perspective, you might be better driving link-juice to your top 10-20 articles and keeping the main navigation simpler. Again, it's a trade-off, and it really depends on your strategy, domain authority, and the relative value of these pages.