Archive links - bad or good

I reviewed many of the big boards. Some of them use the archive links in the footer of their Forumhome.
Some of them don't.

What would you say?
Would it be good to activate that option?
Or could it result in problems with google as it simply looks like something clearly made to optimize the search engines....

Thanks for your comments.

Marcel

bad.

the whole archive is bad and worthless.

with vbseo, its totally unnecessary and counter productive.