Delete Outdated Message Forum?

[sahm]

I run a niche site that is 10+ years old. After a lot of up's and down's this year my site is currently ranking #1 for a handful of key terms, so I don't want to jeapordize that of course.

I have a phpBB message forum on my site that is about 4 years old. There are about 10,000 posts in the forums. I am considering deleting my message forums because after I started manually approving user accounts to cut down on spam accounts my message boards died almost overnight. They are way more trouble than they're worth, and no one is posting on them anymore.

My question is, is it better to just leave it alone, or to get rid of it if most of the posts are years old? If I delete it entirely, it will reduce the size of my entire site in terms of pages by more than half. I don't know if this would affect the "authority" status of my site in the rankings, or if it would help by getting rid of old stale material that isn't ranking anyway. Almost all of the pages are currently in the supplemental index.

Another idea would be to delete it slowly, over the span of a couple of months. I did delete a couple of categories a month or so ago, and so far there has been no effect on my rankings.

Any thoughts?

[ecmedia]

Sahm, you could shut off all new registrations but leave the forum as it is. It is almost always a bad idea to delete pages from an existing website. In any case, if you leave the content as it is, you might still get some traffic from time to time. As you build more content in the main website you can link to some of the pages in the forum if they provide more useful info -- that would put them back in the main index.

[tedster]

I'd suggest you study the URLs for your forum pages. See if they are in the Google index, if they get search traffic, if they have backlinks, and if they show PageRank. That kind of information will help you make a better informed decision.

[Swanny007]

I've been running phpBB forums since 2001. Yeah, spam has been a huge problem over the years.

Anyway, definitely keep the forums there even if you don't allow new registrations. You could also just upgrade to the latest version of phpBB, it's much better at spam prevention.

I have one phpbb forum with 900 posts after nearly 3 years so I can't imagine just deleting a forum with 10K posts due to spam! Don't throw that away. Just delete existing spam when you get time and stop new registrations for now. Besides you might find you want to start up the forums again in a year :-)

[edited by: tedster at 4:47 pm (utc) on Oct. 11, 2008]

[sahm]

Thanks for the input...I'll probably just leave them as is for now. My whole forum shows a grey bar for PageRank, so I don't know how useful that is. I know I receive a little traffic there. The main thing I was concerned about was whether or not it would hurt my site to have so many old, "thin", outdated pages on the site, but it doesn't sound like that will probably be a problem.

[Swanny007]

If you're concerned about the "thin" pages just block crawlers from the "thin" pages. This is in my robots.txt file, it tells spiders to index the viewforum & viewtopic pages (the ones with content, the ones that count):
disallow: /forums/common.php
disallow: /forums/faq.php
disallow: /forums/groupcp.php
disallow: /forums/login.php
disallow: /forums/modcp.php
disallow: /forums/posting.php
disallow: /forums/privmsg.php
disallow: /forums/viewonline.php