Sitemaps or not?

This is a loaded question. I have a lot of my forum posts indexed in the various search engines. It appears some might be indexed twice, the second appearing as one of those indented entries.

I've been told to submit sitemaps but I've also heard horror stories, especially reading Matt Cutts' explanation about how they can use those to figure out what pages you really have on your site against you. This could result in going from a lot of indexed pages to not very many if you don't have a good sitemap tool. I haven't been able to find one that does a great job on over 30,00 pages. In all the major search engines my site lists over 100,000 indexed pages.

So what do we think about sitemaps.... friend or foe?

It works best with vbseo installed, of course.

I use it on all my sites.

Are you talking about the vbseo sitemap generator? That will only deal with vBulletin although the question still remains about whether or not to use sitemaps on an entire site if you're transitioning an existing site that doesn't submit sitemaps.

With regard to vbulletin, I'm also not sure that using vbseo is a good thing on a long established board. The numerous existing links, in theory, should be replaced by a 301 redirect to new ones but from reading here that doesn't always happen in practice. Some have seen a dropoff and then movement forward as the site is reindexed - but they may not get back to where they started for quite a while too. The unknown is very irritating, lol.

you do realize that you're ON vbseo.com ?

Think what you want... but it works. i transitioned at 500k posts, and it's 6x my income since then.

Originally Posted by briansol

you do realize that you're ON vbseo.com ?

Think what you want... but it works. i transitioned at 500k posts, and it's 6x my income since then.

Yes, I do realize. But there are differences between starting with a forum and getting your posts indexed in search engines and elsewhere and then years later making major changes to every link you have indexed everywhere around the Internet. Google may know to make some changes but what about links embedded elsewhere, e.g. backlinks pointing to your site from posters of various communities? There are fundamental differences.

I don't know what you transition and what was responsible for your income level differentiation. I see tales of wild success and others who are wondering how that was accomplished. Before I make any major overhaul I usually try to understand whether I'm comparing apples to oranges, as you can see from the above examples. I think I sent you an email but hadn't heard back. Thanks for your input though.

Originally Posted by hinky

With regard to vbulletin, I'm also not sure that using vbseo is a good thing on a long established board. The numerous existing links, in theory, should be replaced by a 301 redirect to new ones but from reading here that doesn't always happen in practice. Some have seen a dropoff and then movement forward as the site is reindexed - but they may not get back to where they started for quite a while too. The unknown is very irritating, lol.

vBSEO is a good thing for established forums as well. Because vBSEO keeps consistancy and removes all your duplicate urls. vBSEO also 301 redirects your old links to new static formats. This way you will not loose your indexed content and get probably better rankings by link consensus vBSEO supplied.