Effects of dumping forum on our site?

[kidder]

Well today I got up and saw the usual batch of spam posts all over the forum. I looked at the revenue numbers for the forum channel and decided it was no longer worth my time. I proceeded to open up my FTP program and removed the whole VB folder, that was a few thousand posts I expect. We still have thousands of pages of content and any forum traffic from search now redirects to the index page. Our site is now cleaner and leaner so it will be interesting to see what the impact is on the traffic volumes. Any thoughts on how Google may react to this?

[tedster]

A lot will depend on links from the forum to the rest of your site - especially if any forum posts had a significant number of direct backlinks. In that case, previously circulating link juice will be cut off and some rankings could suffer.

[kidder]

There were quite a few outgoing links in the forum as well, probably more than a few going to low quality sites so we hope this will benefit us. If the redirect from the deleted pages is handled correctly the link juice should still flow correct?

[TheMadScientist]

Yes, but personally, I would not redirect everything to the home page... I'm assuming since you had a forum you have topics surrounding the subjects covered in the forum, so rather than redirecting everything to the home page I would put up and redirect to a page stating the Forum has been removed, but you can still find the information you were looking for on our website at:

Home Page : Topic 1 Index : Topic 2 Index : Topic 3 Index

Linking to those pages from a 'middle' landing page should distribute your PR more evenly and keep you from having issues with a large number of redirects going to the home page, which is usually not advised. (I would probably also be inclined to 'noindex' the new 'landing' page.)

The other option is to redirect directly to the topic index pages on a category by category basis from the old forum topics. (The reason for the first recommendation is you get more control over your PR flow than you do by redirecting... IOW If you have one section of your forum with 100 links in it and another section with only 10, by sending everything to one page you concentrate and evenly redistribute PR, where if you redirect to the topics themselves, you pass way more 'weight' to one section of your site to another... It really depends on your specific situation and goals to make the best determination though.)

[tedster]

Hey, if you've got good backlinks to specific forum threads, why not create a "Forum Hall of Fame" and reprint all the good threads? Then you could 301 to the exact same content.

[TheMadScientist]

That's a good idea...
You could also link from there to topical information!
(Maybe from within the text if you were feeling really nutty...)

[kidder]

Thanks for the good feedback, I had never considered the redirected pages might cause an issue with the home page. My thinking was if the content is no longer available the best place to send the users is the to the home page where they can run product searches from. Because we have expiring content (classifieds) that is how the site has always worked.