Whats going on sitemap and posts being indexed problems

I need someone to explain this to me please.

My site map is 4000 pages, just threads are included.

Google has 12000 pages indexed and none of them are members so they must be threads... and what else?

I have tried "site:www.domain.com +vbseo" and according to that all the pages are vBSEO ones so the extra 8k are not old pages.

I also see this in my webmaster account:




My posts are set to permalink only.

Is Google indexing my posts?

Why is it even finding these URLs as they are meant to be no-follow or stopped by vBSEO no?

Please explain, maybe I'm missing something.

Anyone?

The nofollow doesn't guarantee the links won't be followed. If you don't want your showpost pages indexed, turn off rewriting for the showpost page and disallow showpost.php in your ROBOTS.TXT.

Even then, it can take quite a while for any previously indexed pages to drop off. It's not an instant change.

So if i leave permalinks enabled for posts like you have here at vBSEO are you saying that my posts will be indexed?

Isn't that against vBSEOs views on duplicate content?

A permalink links to the thread, not a showpost page, so if you use permalinks then you should be fine. However, previously indexed ones on your site can still take a while to drop out of the search engines.

Hover over the Post # link here on this post. It links to the thread, with an anchor to the correct post; not a showpost page.

Originally Posted by Keith Cohen

A permalink links to the thread, not a showpost page, so if you use permalinks then you should be fine. However, previously indexed ones on your site can still take a while to drop out of the search engines.

Hover over the Post # link here on this post. It links to the thread, with an anchor to the correct post; not a showpost page.

But according to the crawl dates Google found these URLS as recent as a few days ago.

It shouldn't be finding them whatsoever!

The URLS above are not anchors they are duplicate URLs with the same content as the show-thread pages.

EDIT**

Just realised that those URLs re-direct to the anchored versions, so this shouldn't cause duplicate URLs with the same content?

When you changed your sitemap to not include showpost links, did you delete all your old sitemap files? Since you went down on the number of URLs that would be included, you will have less sitemap files, so the older (higher numbered) sitemap files could still exist, and Google could still be downloading those.

But, I looked at your site and your permalinks are set up correctly, so Google is not getting those URLs from reading your pages. It's either getting them from the old leftever sitemap files like I mentioned eariler, or they are just leftover from long ago and they will stop eventually.

I don't understand mate.

How can you include show post in the sitemap when they are not actual pages, if they were actual pages they would have their own URL and then they would be duplicates of show thread...

Also how do i delete my old sitemap files?

Thanks.

In your vBSEO Sitemap settings, do you currently have it set to include Showpost links?

If you do, then set that to No, delete all of the sitemap files from you vbseo_sitemap/data directory (the sitemap_.....gz files), then re-generate your sitemap using the menu option on the vBSEO Sitemap menu.