The forum associated with my entire site was pretty active several years ago. I had the site professionally redone twice and, for whatever reason, with each upgrade participation in the forum declined (but the barrage of spammers increase).

Rather than completely shut down the forum, I recently made it read only because it still contains useful information. I removed the link to the forum from all pages in my site.

Still people somehow find it and, on average, I have more visitors peeking around than when the forum was last active (mind you, not a lot of peekers, just more at any given time than in recent years).

With the "damage" to my site from the recent Google algorithm changes, my web developer suggested he add a no-index to the forum, just in case Google considers the content SPAM.

Any thoughts, suggestions or words of wisdom would be appreciated. Thank you.

btw, I have no inclination to rekindle the forum.