vBSEO and sitemaps

I've been using the Micro-Sys sitemap generator for my web site, but haven't been using for the forums because I didn't like the pre-vBSEO URL results.

I ran it against the web site and forums (with vBSEO installed) and have a couple of questions about the results.

1) The sitemap has many thousands of entries (such as "9436-post1.html") that are a single post view. There are also separate sets of entries such as "support/1001-inkey-m.html" that display the normal forum thread screen with one message displayed. Should both of these be in the sitemap or will Google consider them duplicate content?

2) Looking in "forums/support" in my sitemap, I see some partially duplicated entries. For example, this thread has two messages, but it also has a third entry that appears to duplicate the first one:

1004-inkey-m-post4802.html
1004-inkey-m-post4805.html
1004-inkey-m.html

(These are thread views with multiple messages listed but only the highlighted one displayed.)

The first two (with the post480n) are also flagged as rcRedirectCanonical with a return code of -8, and the third one as OK with a return code of 200.

Should all three be in the sitemap? Or only the first two? (Or only the third?)

Thanks for your help.

One more question:

The entries that look like:

1004-inkey-m-post4802.html
1004-inkey-m-post4805.html
1004-inkey-m.html

appear to be showing the thread window, with the first message displayed (1004-inkey-m-html, 1004-inkey-m-post4802.html) and with the last message displayed (1004-inkey-m-post4805.html). Any threads with more than one message seem to have similar three entries (thread page, first entry, last entry), with the last two being flagged rcRedirectCanonical.

This doesn't seem to make much sense from an SEO viewpoint, so I'm sure I've somehow bollixed up the configuration.

You should choose not to include showpost urls to your sitemap files

OK, but -- how? Is that something I set in the vBSEO options (Showpost URLs in URL Rewrite Settings / Forum URLs ?) or something that I need to configure the sitemap generator to do?

Or would the best solution be to create one sitemap for my web pages (with the Micro-Sys generator) and another for my forums (with the vBSEO sitemap generator) and define both of them in robots.txt?

Sitemap settings are located inside Admincp , you need to change your sitemap settings over there.

Sorry, but we don't support Micro-Sys.

You should remove that and install OUR sitemap tool for best compatibility and support. It's free.

Originally Posted by Brian Cummiskey

Sorry, but we don't support Micro-Sys.

You should remove that and install OUR sitemap tool for best compatibility and support. It's free.

Do you mean just for the forums or for my entire website?

Unless your sitemap tool will generate ROR / RSS / HTML / XML sitemaps, it can't replace the Micro-Sys generator for the web site part.

Our sitemap tool creates gzipped XML sitemaps that all major search engines support. Other versions are not necessary.

Originally Posted by Mert Gökçeimam

You should choose not to include showpost urls to your sitemap files

should choose not to include showpost urls to your sitemap why is this bad? if so why is there an option?

They are duplicate content. With vbseo, on vb3 we recommend using the 'replace showpost with permalink' option and turning them off.
[How To] Replace Showpost Links with Permalinks - Max Out Search Engine Crawling Efficiency - vBulletin SEO Forums

showpost doesn't really exist in vb4.