Having a spammed forum on website - good for backlinks?

[Nomak12]

Hi,

I set up a simple drupal based website around June last year. It had an integrated forum attached which wasn't really being used, but was open to registration and spammers.

It's been spammed the hell out of. Not only on the forums themselves, but on other websites/blogs/forums pointing to spammed posts and pages on my forum. Its at the point there are about a thousand links pointing to different forum URLs on my website. Now my website shows up quite highly (at least temporarily) on a number of search requests, like "buy weight loss pills" etc. Going by google analytics, at least 25% of the organic traffic to hit my page is coming through these links.

It's a low traffic site right now...but I'm looking to increase it as much as possible.

My question is, in terms of SEO what is the best thing to do? Is the spamming bad and shall I just delete the whole forum and be done with it? Should I leave it as it is and take the extra traffic it brings? Or is there anything else I can do in the situation like link/redirect the forum pages to actual pages of content on my website.

My gut feeling is to wipe out all the forum posts, and either close down the forum or switch it to admin approve. Not sure whether it's the better thing to do though.

Any help or insight would be much appreciated,

Thanks in advance

~N

 

[blazen]

Well just delete the forum. The spammed links will not exist too long anyway...but if you don't care, you could switch the external urls to your own affiliate links...

 

[nexozeon]

I guess it all depends on what you want to do with the site, hell it sounds like if you want to sell pills your on the right path. If you blow the forum away you goign to have a ton of traffic to broken links etc, perhaps you could redirect that traffic? Not sure.. Just a thought.. nothing worse than a link to you that you cant take advantage of.

 

[Nomak12]

Fast reply...thanks!

I could set up a redirect from the linked spam forum pages to my homepage (or any other page), but not sure how google's indexing would respond to that.

I'm probably not going to be involved with diet pills or anything outside what I set the website up for.

Other things I didn't mention, the site ranks terrible (700+) for the search keywords I want, and it has gotten worse since I've started some SEO techniques. It's dropped out of the top 1,000. I suspect that has something to do with the spam situation

Also, when I search my domain name in quotes I get 15,000 hits, although most of these are links to spam posts on my forum.

 

[WayneRoberts]

See this thread where I had a similar thing happen

hxxp://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/black-hat-seo/265643-making-xrumer-spam-work-you.html#post2382761