Will deleting threads with the same title (sold) help or hurt my SEO?

[Joe Link]

For years my many of our members changed the title of their sold classified threads to sold. I had no idea Google was taking notice, and when I recently did, I corrected the behavior. Now I'm trying to decide what I should do with thousands of threads titled 'sold'. Many have good content within the thread, though many others have the content deleted.

What would you do?

 

[tajhay]

Archive it, prefix it with sold prefix. Don't delete.

 

[cmeinck]

If you were coming from Google and found one of those threads, would it offer any value? Does it answer a question? I'm guessing that answer is no.

If you want to archive things, I'd setup a forum category where threads are set to no-index, which will remove it from Google's index. The other option is to delete it. Google will see the 404 and eventually remove it from their index.

 

[tajhay]

If you were coming from Google and found one of those threads, would it offer any value? Does it answer a question? I'm guessing that answer is no.

Stock standard xenforo, probably no.

But if you try to utilise some of the addons such as similar threads, it could be of benefit.

 

[Carlos]

I had a similar situation, I deleted a bunch of spam, which turns into a bunch of 404's and google would then classify them as "get these fixed." I click them all as fixed because they're not threads that I want on my site. I wish there was a way to tell google "I deleted these because I don't want them/they're spam."

But because google thinks that your threads were deleted all at once (under "duplicated threads"), yeah, that'd be a visit to your site. I don't know how to respond to your situation exactly, but checkmark all of them and let google decide what to do. Some of your threads were edited, and some of them were deleted. That in itself creates confusion for Google.

Either that, or decide which threads you want reported as fixed. Otherwise, after you've handled the behavior (which in the OP you've stated you've done), I would make a statement about the issue you have here. The suggestion to "archive" was also a good one. Not something I would do, but a good idea, nonetheless.

But to answer your question: Will deleting threads with the same title (sold) help or hurt my SEO? No. It's just that Google is confused. You have to tell them what to do.

If you were coming from Google and found one of those threads, would it offer any value? Does it answer a question? I'm guessing that answer is no.

If you want to archive things, I'd setup a forum category where threads are set to no-index, which will remove it from Google's index. The other option is to delete it. Google will see the 404 and eventually remove it from their index.

This one too.