forum duped and stolen : Removing my forum would it affect seo?

hello i have a forum running xenforo with close to a million posts but had it stolen 4 years ago from me by an ex - mod who duped the site and moved the forum to a different domain but everything is the same as i'd given him full access including ftp and things.. stupid me only had an old backup of the site from like 2 years prior so now his site ranks higher than mine in everything and all users went over there .. whats worse is when i do a google related search to the site, it would always have omitted search results even for new keywords ... i've given up and want a fresh start and to get rid of the forum and only work with wordpress ..

I've checked google console and it doesn't say i've been penalized so my question would be if google would penalize me if i were to remove my forum? and what would be the best and safe way to remove my forum without tanking the domain / seo ? Could i just do a Disallow: /forum/ robots ?

thanks! =/

I would have called the FBI when it was stolen.... You might still want to try that.

Yes, talk to law enforcement about this matter. Even though it has been 4 years it's still theft of a valuable asset which you've worked many years on. You should be able to prove ownership.

Also, file DMCA take down notices with their host, Google and Bing.

mysiteguy said:

Also, file DCMA take down notices with their host, Google and Bing.

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would i have to go through thousands of threads and submit them 1 by 1? or does anyone know a generator that can do it for me? its basically the whole forum

Alfa1 said:

Yes, talk to law enforcement about this matter. Even though it has been 4 years it's still theft of a valuable asset which you've worked many years on. You should be able to prove ownership.

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i've already settled on starting new as im sure the older users would continue to post through the other site than mine by now , but i'd love to file a dcma on the thread contents so i could get my rankings back

^
oh yea with that aside and my second question is ... i would eventually get rid of the forums and it has close to 1 million posts , is there a safe way to deindex / remove it without triggering google? like could i just do a /noindex/ ? much thanks

thank you , im probably just going to let it be for now =//// dont have the cash and have a new idea for the site as i dont want to waste many more months having it up ideling =///

*edit*

it'd be awesome if anyone knows if google would hate it if i got rid of the forums which has almost a million posts

I would still suggest contacting law enforcement...