Have you checked all your sitemap files? There is a bug

If you use smart priority, it witll calculate based on the 'smart' factors, not the hardcoded setting.

Originally Posted by wac

Not sure if it could be a bug but, I was checking my sitemap files through the browser and the <changfreq> is set to "yearly" instead of daily for showthreads even though I set it to daily. I thought I maybe had a mistake in the settings so I deleted the sitemap files in the data folder and went ahead and made sure that showthread frequency was set to daily. Again, it didn't help. I then downloaded a fresh copy of the sitemap for 3.8.x from vbulletin.org, reinstalled and it didn't help either. No wonder Google deindexed 88k pages of my site. I'm down to 2k.

Again, I reinstalled the plugin, cleared browser cache, cookies and nothing helped. There are other people with site being deindexed so maybe this could be the problem. The only pages I included in this sitemap were SHOWTHREADS. The other pages had "yearly" or "never" set as their frequency but were not included in the sitemap. So somehow SHOWTHREADS inherited the "yearly" <changfreq> setting.

Ahh, thanks so much for this post wac
I was wondering what happens to my site since I did install the new sitemap last year,
my pages kept decreasing, and my crawling statistics in google webmaster tools are super low!

Now I did read your post, checked my sitemap in browser and yes, ALL my showtheads pages are on "yearly"

I did now also disable the smart priority and regenerated the sitemap
checked again, and it is ok now,
Now I do hope that I will see more indexed pages again soon.

Thanks again wac, I think I would have never ever known about this if you not post it here.

lol, thank you wac, but am not feeling suicidal, lol

Can I ask you, did you check your crawling statistics in google webmaster tools
mine are very low, for both of my vbforums, while they show much higher for my other websites.

I am not sure if the frequenzy in sitemap has something to do with it.
It might be google has a problem with forums at the moment?
Many strange things going on with google results. People also report sometimes they get results like from 10 years ago.
So maybe all has to do with google testing still their new "caffeine" ?

yes something I think happens now with google, right now I see another google spider in my "online.php" using the IP 212.1.248.17
so at the moment I see 2 diffrent google spiders crawling my posts, the other one has 66.249.65.38 .

Funny that this other google keeps trying to access misc.php - who posted,
misc.php is disallowed in my robots text.

Is this normal behaviour?

Robots files are merely suggestions for bots to follow. They will still do what they want :(