Critique Wanted: TalkBass.com

So, I started TalkBass.com back in 1998 and was one of VB's first customers. We've grown tremendously mostly because we were the first, and are up to almost 10MM posts. I'm just now putting SEO at the top of my agenda. vBSEO and Sitemap are installed.

Some particular issues I'm wondering about: We use vBAdvanced as a front-page portal that simply pulls 'recent threads'. This portal page (at site root TalkBass.com) has a PR of 4. Our forum home page (TalkBass Forums: The Bass Guitar and Double Bass Online Community) then has a PR of 3. If you click into a category to actually get to a forum listing (ie Bass Guitar or Double Bass), the PR is non existant. Would we be better SEO'ed if we axed the portal page? Would that "combine" our pagerank, so to speak?

Thanks for any and all feedback!

I would suggest axing the portal page from the sole purpose that it simply displays stuff that is already available anyway. I never got the point of it.

But, I would suggest ignoring anything to do with page rank. It has nothing to do with content, quality, ranking, or even SEO. it's an inaccurate 'count' of links in. The best thing to do is to simply ignore it.

I've seen blogs with 1 post be PR6 and forums with 1000000 posts be PR0.

Guess which one has a community and is making money?