Would you delete thin UGC or add noindex tag to it?

I've a forum with lot of thin user generated content. I wish to improve its SEO and wondering if I should simply delete the thin content (and return 404 error) OR just add

<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />

tag to all those pages?

What would be the right strategy for better SEO?

 

How do you know it's the thin content (which can mean different things to different people) that is dragging your forum down?

 

@qwikad.com - good question. We do not have a clear indicator that it's the thin content that's dragging us down. However, in the last ~2.5 years we've done almost everything to get our rankings back. In fact, we've already added `noindex` to the thin content; but it hasn't really helped. Following is an overview of the things we've done:-

• Rewrote HTML to improve Signal to Noise ratio
• Fixed the redirects
• Tried updating threads that ranked very well in the past
• Ensured that high quality backlinks are pointing to the right pages and are not 404'ing.
• Removed the pop-up that triggered after the guest has spent ~30 seconds on the site
• Ensured sitemaps are in place and are updated daily
• Ensured 90+ score in Lighthouse for ~99% of the pages.
• We score 90+ for best SEO practices indicated by Google web.dev tools.
• Added structured data for QnA and News pages
• Never participated in link-building or link exchanges OR anything that Google objects to

However, this hasn't really helped get our traffic back. We noticed that Google does not crawl/index our new discussions as quickly as it used to ~3 years ago.

We now think that Google is spending lot of time crawling and indexing thin content and thinking this site has large amount of thin content. Maybe that's the reason it's not ranking our content well.

Would appreciate any suggestions, comments.

 

Do you think it's a result of overall disinterest in forums? This forum used to be Yuuuuge! but look at it now. It's still busy some days, but overall it feels dead. I don't believe Google has anything to do with it.

 

No; we still get ~70K uniques/month. This was close to a million about 2 years ago. Conversion rate is the same; but overall activity has gone down.

All I want is Google to index our content and rank it; if it's worth ranking. That's what I want to happen.