Indexed pages

For over a year I didnt use Sitemap generator because I moved to a new server and something went wrong, it didnt work.

End of June I upgraded to vB4 and latest vBSEO. Few weeks later I installed the latest sitemap generator. Since then, number of indexed pages in Google is a lot lower. I only have around 15,000 pages indexed now. (At most it was hundred of thousands)

Should I put these sitemap links back to my footer or change settings for sitemap generator?

The strange thing tho, it that Google webmaster report 38k URLs in index. (Very different from site: command) Sitemap report 48k something.

Traffic is pretty much same, slightly better actually due to all my optimizations lately.

Would I be better off not using sitemap generator? I dont want single posts indexed, I guess that was the case in the past, but 15k threads out of 50k is not really good.

It sounds like you are confusing the Sitemap (xml) with the archive (re-written to /sitemap with vbseo)

The site: command is known to be inaccurate.
As traffic is better, you shouldn't do anything. Getting urls into google takes some time. The sitemap will help this.

I was thinking like the archive footer links maybe spread out PR to all these pages and thus all threads got indexed. I always had those footer links but removed them last month. Sitemap generator give a score or something to each URL, I use default, and since then have a lot less in Google, according to site:

One reason ofcourse, I got rid of single posts. But as I have 50k threads, I would expect to see atleast something close to 50k rather than 15k.

Footer links was maybe not so bad after all, I am thinking. Like spreading out GoogleBot to all those (old) threads.

I dont know how sitemap generator work, but old pages get a low important score while new ones a higher important score or something?

Maybe footer links made all pages equal, and thus all pages got indexed?

I dont know. I only noticed the number of pages in Google is a lot less than it used to be. (Was 38k 2 months ago I think)

Traffic last 30 days is 30,000 more visitors compared to the same 30 days last year. (According to Analytics, but also the same time last year Sitemap generator was not working, but number of pages in Google was a lot higher tho)

Everytime you change something, good or bad, a dip is expected. IT should follow an upward trend later on if it was a good choice.

I will give this a month, then I will turn on archive footer links again and see if any changes.

I would suggest leaving them off permantly.

I want to find out if archive footer links is the reason why I dropped so many pages, logically, footer links would spread out PR equally to all threads in the forum. I always had footer links in the past and a lot more pages indexed.

I know you dont recommend footer links, but I think they may be useful after all. (And thats why it was added to vbseo in first place I guess)

My simple research;

I will keep it off for a month.

In one month I will turn it on again and see if number of indexed pages/threads in Google increases or not.

The answer of that simple test will do the decision for me.

About the drop pages, Please check this thread : i loss my Topics In Google
And let me know if your visitors from SE has decreased .......

About footer archive, You can use it if the number of it was 20 at maximum 30 link, But if you found it more than 30 link then you should disable it, Since Google recommended at maximum 100 link per page that's our main reason