[T2DMan]

Originally Posted by princessfrozen

Mega ditto. My pages indexed are steadily falling. If this trend continues, I'm going to have to uninstall. Also, the pages that Google has aren't the ones in the sitemap. What gives?

Have you recently upgraded to vbulletin 3.5. There are many rel=nofollows on the new version that means that many duplicate url's are no longer available to the search engines. This would reduce the urls reported on Google/Yahoo. But this is nothing to worry about.

You have to understand what a sitemap is. Its just a list of url's of your existing forum. It lets Google/Yahoo know the url's that you have, and the new ones that have been added.

How many pages are reported on google compared to the url's in the sitemap? If you have an old site, and less url's in Google than the sitemap, then you possibly need more inbound links/Google Pr, and better onpage SEO.

A site map does not SEO your pages, does not make each page any more unique than any other regards duplicate content... A sitemap can do no harm, and Google still spiders your site normally.

Do you have the vbSEO rewrite installed?
Do you have any other url rewrite hack installed?

Since rewrite hacks will have a big effect on the url's this would give some answers. You would need to make sure that the sitemap was doing the rewritten urls properly (certainly would work with vbseo url rewriter).

Apart from the above, just put it down to the ups and downs of how Google and Yahoo report pages.

I recommend that you look at the onpage SEO template changes I recommend on my thread Search Engine Optimize vBulletin 3.5. With vBSEO, and my onpage changes, sites generally get to the top of the SERPS for many forums and threads.

All the best.