Content that receives no traffic

[Maximum44]

We have a big section of our website in a forum style format. We do not use any forum software. It is all custom built.

My question is how bad is content that recieve zero or very litte traffic? We are talking about probably 100,000+ pages in a q&a format. I already noindexed unanswered content. But content with one reply or more is still live. Some of that content gets virtually no traffic from the search engines.

Content can be up to 10 years old. New content is added every day.

We do have some great posts that recieve traffic. But i suspect the "no traffic content" is deemed as bad and brings the rest of the content down!

[morpheus83]

How about incoming links? Are you getting them as well?

[Maximum44]

We have a bunch of incoming links, about 150,000 but they are going to other content.

[morpheus83]

Well in that case the content without the incoming links would just bleed your PR and relevancy.

[tangor]

Many forums (or "forum-style") do not rank well. UGC, in general, is deprecated in the SEs. You might consider noindexing the forum section and not worry about that section dragging down the rest of the site. Secondary, the info would have to be better than average because average just don't rank any longer.

[Maximum44]

Actually the forum performs pretty ok. It gets the majority of the traffic (80%). It is more than a Q&A than random conversation. The content is relevant. Some of it are just dead. Think of it as Stackoverflow but in a different field.

[tangor]

If thinking like Stackoverflow but a different field then kill all the dead stuff and don't worry about it. Also hope we aren't thinking like Stackoverflow as they have a whole different set of problems most of us (forum or forum-style) webmasters wish to avoid.

[Maximum44]

Thanks for the input! I'll let you know what happens after i kill some content (keeping backups ofc) :)

[tangor]

Those backups might make a nice archive section, so do keep those! What is out of style today might make a comeback in the future.