Mark, the change won't be noticeable immedaitely, likely after a month you'll see things start to get larger (keep in mind the sitemap is to ultimately shove their discovery bot to the side, and tell their crawling bot where exactly to look, so once it gets started it'll work well).
BTW, my rankings are only from 2 months of the sitemap (as I made it, dun dun dun, 2 months ago lol).
For me I have been running the new Threads since January and Google simply is NOT crawling ANY of my threads. I do have a site map and robots.txt file and Google is crawling my site, but just NOT the threads - zero, zip, nada since January. If I do this:
site:http://www.britishcarforum.com I get about 38,400 hits, but ZERO none are of my current threads set up. The threads that do show are for my OLD threads 6.5 install - I can tell by the directory that shows up. If I do this, to see just threads in my new directory/threads install:
I get exactly ONE thread returned. This is just weird. There must be something about the layout of pages under Threads 7 that Google just does not like - and I think we as a community owe it to ourselves to figure out WHAT is the problem so it can be fixed. One thing that is different with Threads 7 from previous version is that that main site index page is not the portal page or a forum page, but only a re-director to the forums. Also, when guests view teh forums, ther see the side boxes and I'm wondering if that "portal-style" configuration might be what is messing up Google? Just brainstorming here - any other thoughts?
