i have

removed my showpost.php from the sitemap app as i was checking it out before and the url to the showpost.php is just a link to that singular post in the thread. this has no link to the thread that i can see of and no links to my forum home page etc. and also no google ads (as i aint put them on lol)

im thinking that the content in that showpost.php will be indexed anyway within the showthread.php. which then goes to a page with my ad's etc on

does anyone else agree with me on this or am i missing something along the line as to why it would be a good idea to include the showpost.php in the sitemap generation?

many thanks for ya time

yup, a lot of people, including myself, not only don't generate the sitemap for them, but also robots.txt them out of being spidered.
also, i'd recommend that if you use the robots.txt file to block them from being spawned, to turn off the vBSEO option to re-write them, that way you can simply block showpost.php, and not XXXXXX url's that have been re-writtten.

ah ok, thanks for that briansol. i also already had my printthread.php in my robots.txt file but didnt tell vbseo to not rewrite them and so now this should work for me whereas it wouldnt have been doing i see before.

two birds with one stone, nice one!

oh and finally. is it a idea not to sitemap the archive pages of the forum? i have them set to redirect to the thread anyway and so is there any point in having them in the sitemap do you think?

many thanks for your time

I use the middle option as well, to act as a sitemap listing, then when clicked, shows the real thread. I allow the archive pages to get spawned. This is not duplicate content- since it isn't content. it's simply links to 1 content area, from different places.

Can you people make it little simpler for me as I am not a great techie but want to understand what you are saying?

we're talking about the "Archive" in vBulletin. vBSEO gives an option to change the way it normally acts (basically, plain text only, but duplicate content) into a sitemap. the option above that i talk about is set here. you can view the sitemap http://www.vbseo.com/sitemap/ and see that its merely a bunch of links, but when it gets to the thread, it actually links to the REAL post, not the stripped down version.