vbseo, a terrible mistake? from 52.000 indexed pages to 500 in a week

It is the visitors chart from May 14th to yesterday, today showing an upward curve.
But I do not want to exclude all forums,

Last week I hired a firm that is posting unique posts on topic, and replies to it by other members, so there is some content being added that is user generated.

How to exclude the one but not the other?

If you confine the RSS stuff to individual sub-forums and you don't allow unique content to get posted in there, then it will be sorted. For instance, if we wanted to block this forum the robots.txt line would be:

Disallow: /f84/

Is it smart though, as it does seem to get some traffic today...
Also, in the google index they are indexed.

However they do not seem to be dominant in my
Top Landing Pages


Not sure what to do, and I feel that whatever it is I do now is important as it will be like that for the years to come.

How to maximize this?

Do you think you can create a good volume of original content without relying on the RSS?

If so, you might consider blocking them. I really don't think you should end up with a penalty for them, but it's possibly that they could simply not rank well ever, while still consuming some of your link value passing through the site.

I say that while knowing that people have successfully turned content mined from different sources on the Web into serious traffic streams. It's risky business.

If i were you i would do the following :

• Block RSS feed forums via Robots.txt
• Donot include RSS feed's to your Sitemaps ( exclude those forums within vBSEO Sitemap Generator options )
• Hire an editor and ask him to post daily unique and fresh articles on your forum that can grab visitors attention.
• And from time to time i suggest you to minimize RSS usage on your forum. The problem with RSS feed is it creates duplicate content on your page , increases your db size for nothing and it is very hard to follow an RSS feed generated forum for end user also.

Well I guess I was impatient, as usual.

The site is now showing a strong curve upwards, and google is re-indexing the site. Slowly the keywords are building in analytics and the trend seems to be towards the postings, not the RSS feeds.

Exciting I have to admit.

Membership has grown too

Mike

The site is now showing a strong curve upwards,

SEO can be a frustrating project. Back in the "old days" we would have to wait 30 days to see the results of any changes we made. The trade off was that it was also possible to dominate the search results for selected terms. Now, the algorithms are better at fighting search spam, but our efforts are also measurable in shorter time frames.

Congrats on the upward trend. I hope this is just the start of a really tall chart!