Does removing fake user profile pages reduce my ranking given they are 98% of my website pages?

I have a dilemma and would appreciate help from anyone here.

I have a website that is a forum with good traffic. I've started paying more attention to driving traffic to the website via organic search and am targeting particular keywords.

Unfortunately, my website has been under the attack of bots that keep signing up and creating user profiles on the website and include links to their websites in their profile descriptions. These users are not able to publish any content on the website except for creating a user profile page.

The dilemma I have is that while these user profile pages are not good, they also contain the standard innerlinks & meta descriptions I use on every page of the website to link to main page via hyperlinks for keywords I'm targeting.

Now I am looking at my site on ahrefs and can see that my UR and DR are low (less than 30). I have 40K pages, strong majority of which are these user profiles.

Should I purge all these fake user profile pages given they contain URL's to bad websites? or given they are being used for my innerlinking and promotion of my keywords, it's better to not touch them?

I'm worried that if my total number of pages drop from 40K to 1,000 all of a sudden, our SEO rankings significantly drop.

Any thoughts or feedback is greatly appreciated.

submitted by /u/bijansha
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from Search Engine Optimization: The Latest SEO News https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/avyyo7/does_removing_fake_user_profile_pages_reduce_my/>