noindex or prune old content? 15 year old site

[TheBigK]

Dear webmasters and SEO experts,

I'm given a responsibility of reviving a forum that's been around for 15 years; has seen platform changes from phpBB -> vBulletin -> xenForo -> and now on custom code; built from scratch.

The website was primarily a forum for almost 12 years; and has added other content sections (Quizzes, Projects, News etc.) in the last ~4 years; while the forum continues to exist and drive traffic.

I have been working on improving the traffic to the site since last 1.5 years, but haven't got much success. My observations are as follows -

1. The user generated content on forums has traditionally driven 90%+ traffic to the site through Google.
2. The forum content has ~20% quality content that drives majority of traffic.
3. The remaining 80% of the forum content is thin; but solves practical problems and has backlinks as well. Several of the threads rank well, despite being very thin; and even have backlinks.

What I've done so far -

1. I added 'noindex' to all the thin content based on word-count. This seems to have had no effect on the traffic in the last ~12 months.
2. I ensured all good practices for on-page SEO. Almost every page does 90+ on page-speed and SEO best practices.
3. Linked to the index page of the forum from the front page of the site.
4. Added Sitemap for the forum that excludes all 'noindex' content; and only feeds the content we want indexed.

Yet, there seems to be no noticeable impact on the traffic.

The new content we produce does not get picked up by Google for days (some even months!).

I'd really appreciate advice from fellow webmasters. I'm going nuts with this.

Thanks!

[JesterMagic]

Regarding 3. I think too many webmasters get caught in the thin content trap. Content doesn't have to be bloated with keywords to be good and if it solves problems and gets backlinks, just leave it alone. On forums I would only remove spam and truely thin content on topics that do not fit within the scope of the niche for the website. Let Google worry about selecting what content to rank.

Yet, there seems to be no noticeable impact on the traffic.

I am not sure how well moderated your forum was/is but most likely you are also hurting yourself in point 1 by noindexing content that may have a low word count but still is good content and answers users questions.

The new content we produce does not get picked up by Google for days (some even months!).

Do you have a sitemap for tour website? You should include all forum topics in your sitemap.

[TheBigK]

@JesterMagic - really appreciate your response. Thank you.

The forums were very well moderated - and if spam exists it's definitely < 0.2% of the entire content.

Regarding the low word, but useful content - we've manually checked the threads that drive traffic and have updated them with more useful content; to keep it out of 'noindex' tag.

We do have an XML sitemap for several years now and it's up to date. Google has reported no errors.

That said, we don't have (never had) any manual penalty from Google.

<no reviews please>

I'm no novice in SEO; and have followed almost everything I've known; yet I can't get the site back on growth path. The traffic has plummeted from ~700,000 UVs/mo to now 60,000 UVs/mo; and is steady.

Perhaps, Google does not see value in the content that it used to see. My new worry is that if we launch anything on the domain; it will get hurt by the existing content.

That's my big dilemma. Would really appreciate more help.

[edited by: not2easy at 3:34 pm (utc) on Sep 27, 2020]
[edit reason] Please see ToS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[not2easy]

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