ken_b - 1:41 am on Aug 7, 2009 (gmt 0)

Do you have back up copies of the pages you removed? If so, maybe put the pages back up and see what happens. If your ranking improves you can decide what to do then. With the guest book, maybe just turn off posting if you don't want to maintain it.

Maybe recreate the urls and run them through Yahoo Site Explorer and see what kind of back links they had, and what kind of anchor text was used on those links, and the relevance of the linking pages.

Page Rank may not be as important as it has been in the past, but it may still have made a difference here for the removed pages and whatever PR they may have passed to your other pages.