A little description of what google does and several suggestions...

When google "hits" your site, it grabs new links and grabs content from the pages it was sent to do so; basically it does crawling and discovery at once.

Adding a SiteMap aids highly in discovery, since you're telling google what is there, and it knows what links it needs to crawl by your sitemap (it still does its own discovery, but it's hit and grab vs your feeding it valid links).

You can block search engines from crawling your calendar with a robots.txt entry:
robots.txt:
Code
User-agent: *
Disallow: /forum/ubbthreads.php?ubb=calendar
Disallow: /forum/ubbthreads.php/ubb/calendar
Disallow: /forum/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showday
Disallow: /forum/ubbthreads.php/ubb/showday

As for "why you'd need a sitemap", I can only recommend you read the FAQ at google here (or read about my UBB.Sitemap generator here) as nothing i say can say it better.

Also, by using a sitemap, your links will be crawled regardless of SE links being on, as the links to your threads that are fed to the search engines (most major SE's now support sitemaps for note) will not "break" links, as you won't have to worry about most of the discovery (as you're telling them what links are there and are valid)

As for Ian saying he wants a sitemap for both his site and his forums, the UBB Sitemap generator grabs feeds live from your forum, and you can submit numerous sitemaps to google, so you could use alternate "link building" sitemap generators for miscellaneous site data.


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