Indexed URLS only about 10% of submitted URLS

For the many weeks I have had vbseo and the sitemap plugin installed , and Google are only seeming to index about 10% of my submitted sitemap:

Sitemap Index Total: 279,613, Indexed: 25,320

Sometimes it goes up to 27,000, but not more than that so far.

Why is that?

The indexing can take anywhere from a few weeks to months before most of your links are indexed, I understand you have been running a few weeks but there are many factors into how quickly your site is indexed.

Assuming that it is not just a time issue do you have 279,613 threads or are you also including your showpost links in the sitemap? Google will tend to ignore showpost pages as the content is generally duplicated.

I would recommend submitting a "Critique Please" thread to see if there are any tips we can offer to increase your Crawl efficiency and Optimisation though just in case there is something to look at.

Ceri

Is a lot of the 279k bloat?

member pages, tags, etc likely won't ever be a SERP and are best left out of the sitemap.

We have like 5 million posts on the site. Showpost is not included in the 279k, I have disabled including that in the sitemap control panel. Also I have a robots text file that should keep the bots out of the following:

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow:

Allow: /

User-agent: *
Disallow: /board/admincp/
Disallow: /board/backup/
Disallow: /board/calendar.php
Disallow: /board/cron.php
Disallow: /board/editpost.php
Disallow: /board/joinrequests.php
Disallow: /board/group.php
Disallow: /board/login.php
Disallow: /board/member.php
Disallow: /board/misc.php
Disallow: /board/modcp/
Disallow: /board/moderator.php
Disallow: /board/newreply.php
Disallow: /board/newthread.php
Disallow: /board/online.php
Disallow: /board/printthread.php
Disallow: /board/private.php
Disallow: /board/profile.php
Disallow: /board/register.php
Disallow: /board/search.php
Disallow: /board/sendmessage.php
Disallow: /board/showgroups.php
Disallow: /board/showpost.php
Disallow: /board/subscription.php
Disallow: /board/subscriptions.php
Disallow: /board/threadrate.php
Disallow: /board/usercp.php

User-Agent: msnbot
Crawl-Delay: 10

User-Agent: Slurp
Crawl-Delay: 10

Sitemap: http://www.tribemagazine.com/board/sitemap_index.xml.gz

Google will never index all of the submitted URLs in sitemap, That's will increase by the time but it will never index the all URLs in your sitemap.
Just include only showthreads and forumdisplay pages.

I've been including everything in my sitemap for months and I found out it was useless.

As marco1 said above me, you better leave only showthread and forumdisplay in your board as these are the links which will be given a higher priority from Google.