I don't think I understand enough to ask the right question

I don't think I understand enough to ask the right question but I am going to try.

So I think it was last weekend when I installed the vbSEO hack. I had about 53K pages in google already thanks to your site map hack which was there for a few weeks prior. Now the next day the indexed pages went up a bit, and again the day after.

Then it want way down to something close to 14K. I didn't panic, it made me nervous and I thought I had done something completely stupid, but I stayed the course. I did a search for site:www.teampicard.net/ and vbseo that day and I had a few hundred pages, so I knew something was going on. It was fewer pages than the "Show SE Bots Activity Log" but I was willing to wait.

Now for the wierd part (for me at least). Today I have 91K pages in google, and 21,200 are have the vbseo mark on them. The "Show SE Bots Activity Log" seems to show that google has visited far fewer pages than that. All in less than a week.

So do I have that much duplicate content and should I be worried?
Are there different results for different google servers? If so how often to they share data?

I don't think I understand enough of what happened to really know how to move forward and keep things improving.

I think Google might still be listing some of your older showthread.php?t=## pages in their listing, but they are obviously aware that your URLs have undergone a slight change, thus, the drop in indexed pages. I'd recommend waiting a couple more days and see how the index rate currently is with you, but certainly, sharp drops like this could be expected when installing a product like this. Thankfully though, this software also uses a protocal called 301 redirect; which informs search engines bots that when you are trying to view a page such as ./showthread.php?t=2390 and you are redirected to ./forum-feedback/tell-me-more-2390.html that this page has been perminantly redirected and that the content between these two pages isnt duplicated but has instead been moved.

The idea is to purge all duplicate content from your indexed pages, and then focus on getting new valuable content indexed more expediently. As Michael noted, the 301s are the safety mechanism that ensure that your content is updated, not just dropped and re-indexed all over again.

If you have 21,200 vBSEO-enabled pages indexed already, you are doing excellent. Keep us posted on your progress.

Ok, I am now at 66,000 pages(which is much closer to what makes sense since my site isn't all that big) 32,000 pages have the vbseo text. Looks like I am still moving in the right direction.