[Pottsy]

Just to pass on some .htaccess wisdom (ie I managed to fix this for myself after a bit of reading)...

My forums are in www.mydomain/forum

My root htaccess contains:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.mydomain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [QSA,L,R=301]

This stops any Google duplicate content penalties by redirecting http://mydomain.com or 123.45.67.89/~user/forum type addresses to http://www.mydomain.com.

Fine.

Then I put this mods htaccess into my forum directory, and a month or 2 later Google has picked up and is indexing pages like:

123.45.67.89/~username/forum/showthread.php?p=56800

Yikes! Duplicate content penalty.

To fix this, your htaccess file in your forum directory should look like:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.mydomain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.mydomain.com/forum/$1 [QSA,L,R=301]

RewriteRule ^(sitemap.*\.(xml|txt)(\.gz)?)$ vbseo_sitemap/vbseo_getsitemap.php?sitemap=$1 [L]

HTH