Google crawlers take time. I submitted the URL on the google page yesterday (
http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl ), though I agree more could be done.
That's not the point. Let's say I have an inventory of 10k page views a day, much of that from search engines. If you deep six that inventory those page views are gone and you then have to implement a rewrite strategy to deal with all the visitors coming to see content. It's not there. It's a double headed issue. Because there is little content at the new site, traffic and potential revenue is impacted. Because the old site is deep sixed, or at least in archive mode, there can be no new discussions and as a community it's tough to gain traction on a closed property.
It's possible that a smaller walled garden with fewer, higher end, preselected participants may eventually offer better content but once the property has reached critical mass, like the LAB has, they are disenfranchising the very people that create the content. The trick is striking the right balance between higher end content and entry level content and not letting one drag the other down. In the case of the LAB the balance shifted to entry level content long ago. That's neither good nor bad in the big picture, that's just how it is.
Because the property is run by publishing execs and not sound guys, there is a disconnect of the value of the content and a lack of understanding of the culture of the community. To run and operate a successful online community the owners/operators have to understand the community. By that I don't mean the moderators but the people that have skin in the game as the owners.
