reduced umber of URL's in sitemap by 97% 2 weeks later 1,100% increase in index urls

I recently took over a board that was pretty much abandonned. I bought VB4 Suite and VBSEO but am still testing that in a non live environment. The previous owner had the vbseo sitemap generator installed on the 3.8 board but not VBSEO.

The sitemap had 197,000 URL's in it when I took over the site and Google had 280 URL's indexed. I deleted 90,000 garbage posts from the forum (RSS feeds to Ebay auctions and garbage like that) I then disabled the Archive and made changes to the sitemap generator to not include memebrs pages, the archive, and basically everything that is fluff.

My sitemap went from 197,000 URLS to just over 6,000 URLS. Two weeks later Google now has 3,210 URLS index on my site.

That's amazing, to me. It was just a test and I really didn't care about the results. the forum is locked from posting and new members anyway as it was abandoned for the last year or so anyway and I am waiting til I move to VB4 to restart it.

It probably helps that the domain is 11 years old and using the way back machine I can see there was a forum for the same topic going back to at least 2001. So new boards might not be so lucky.

That along with the fact my Board ranks on the first page (at the bottom) of Google for highly competitive keywords while it has been trashed for the last year makes me confident that when I open it up and clean up all the garbage and install VBSEO I will get great results. I can't believe it is still ranked so high in Google in the first place.

This just further proves that Quality > Quantity.

5 days since my original post and indexed pages are now up to 4,080 in Google

First of all I sure you have include showposts and archive and old links, Make sure you have choose NO on these settings.
About your pages indexed number : if you want to know the correct indexed pages number use site:yourdomain . com that's the best way to know your pages indexed number in Google.