Cleaning up a site after heavy spamming, getting better ranking

I have a site that I've had for years and it had a forum on it which I kind of just let go, forgot about. Now, I want to re-use the site for something new, but the site in Google has a lot of spam content listed because the forums got spammed heavily while I was not doing anything with the site.

I have cleaned up the forums, deleted all spam, as well as put safeguards in place to prevent again, such as making all forum links nofollow. The problem is though that Google has over 4,000 records for my site if I do a site:mysite.com search and I would say that at least half of them are spam forum posts.

How do I get Google to remove these links? Is it just a matter of letting Google recrawl and hit the 404 pages? Also, the site has a current pagerank of 2, how will the spamming affect the site now that it is removed? Will it be possible to build positive pagerank or will there be a penalty? Since Panda and all the other updates I've seen the PR go down from 3 to 2 and don't want it to go any lower.

Thanks for any help.

 

Don't sweat the PR. Having said that, you may have a few growing pains but it should not be too bad. Make sure you re-run a sitemap and re-submit it to webmaster tools. It will sort it itself out. You may want to make sure you have a useful 404 page as well.

hope that helps,
Nigel

 

Since google has already shot down your PR level, you must now concentrate on building natural backlinks to your site. Just make sure the content and links whatever that relates to your website is all natural and of high quality. This would keep you safe. I would also like to add that PR doesn't really count much if you have real good traffic on your site.

 

If you work hard, you can be able to get quality backlinks again, But do it in a ethical manner.

 

You can get back into a search engine’s good graces after getting caught spamming and being yanked out of the index. It involves going through your page and cleaning it up, removing all of the spam issues that caused it to get yanked in the first place, and re-submitting your page for placement into the index. Don’t expect an immediate resubmission, though. You have to wait in line with everyone else.

 

Thanks for the tips.

To clear some things up though, my site was not spamming its links out, it was being spammed, basically forum posts were being made by bots then getting indexed by Google.