Showpost or not showpost! That is the question..

There seems to be some disagreement whether individual posts should be indexed or not. I can't even get mine indexed but the question still remains whether we should include them or not consdiering some might say it could be viewed as duplicate content or it or could dilute the PR. Your thoughts? And has anyone had any luck lately actually getting their's indexed?

Very interesting.

I've noticed that for some reason Google will not index that many showposts pages, even if they are rewritten & non-rel='nofollow'ed.

Hmm...thats a ton of content that can be used for adsense. Even though the content is pretty much low quality it still is a massive amount of information that could be utlized for click-through's if it only got indexed.

I have an adsense leaderboard at the top of my showpost template that does pretty well. But, I don't have showposts in my sitemap, and I have them blocked in robots.txt.

If you want your showposts to stand any chance of ranking on the search engines, then they need to be specifically onpage seo'ed.

ie title, meta description, opening paragraph including the words of the title.

You will find that the default template is not very well seo'ed. And I have not included change instructions in my base seo vbulletin threads.

Personally, I prefer to not dilute the Google PR of the showthreads by allowing the showposts. But then again, I do allow for live members profile url's and sig threads to include links, so the PR going from a showthread is pretty diluted anyway.

I just prefer to let my threads be found for the content of the posts, rather than the posts being able to be found in their own right.

But if you do decide to have live showpost links just make sure that you onpage seo them, otherwise, its a bit of a waste.