Remove various code or am I just over-doing it

Now, I got lazy with my current skin after I had finished with the graphic design and coding (yeah...it's not coded very well either) and didn't do some SEO edits that I probably should have done before I publicly released it. I just did a few small ones such as removing the last post column and removing the list of users online from guests.

I was then looking at other things that I could possibly remove and saw "Call of Duty 4 (38 Viewing)" and I thought to myself...why not remove the "(# Viewing)" from guest view since viewing is being repeated quite often and is un-needed for guests IMO. Am I just nit picking (I figured I'm just nit picking right now)?

I have quite a few sub-forums...so that adds a lot of links to the forumhome...should I make it so guests can't view the subforums or no? I was thinking it would be nice to be able to chose to pick certain subforums to not show to guests b/c some of them are just useless to guests where others are much more helpful.

I would recommend keeping all of your content open. If you feel it might not be valuable enough for guests, maybe you can remove it from the site entirely?

As for scaling back your template, I think that if you have the skills to make these edits, why not do so? Some might argue that the improvement would be insignificant. I think it can help enhance the relevancy of the remaining terms of the page. While it may provide only minor enhancement, over thousands of your pages, a small %-age of those pages could actually see ranking improvement.

You have to make the decision between what to remove for SEO purposes, and what should not be sacrificed for usability purposes.

Also do a basic cost vs. benefit. How long will it take you to complete the edits, now and future work required because of the edits. If it's too much time required, then the costs might be too high for you to receive a significant return for your efforts.