Ok, So I have a PHPbb forum board that I host myself and I have registered with google and uploaded a sitemap and everything but why is it that all the indexing done is everything on my site EXCEPT discussions taking place within the forums? When I google my index stats there is 15 pages of nonsense! There is indexing of my member list witch is fine I guess. Another thing is that I have a disclaimer embeded right into the overall_header file for the board and it's indexing that so I thought I would take advantage of that and added like 30 keyword tags to the footer. Would that be a good idea? I would think so, my disclaimer is being indexed..
I suggest you add "rel=nofollow" to links that you don't want indexed. Essentially you want to channel your pagerank to the pages that you want to rank the highest and no follow the ones that you dont want to give pagerank too. This saves up your pagerank for your good pages like the conversational ones. Hope that helps?
You'll need to get in and edit the php files for the forum software. If you use something like Notepad++, you can do multiple file search and replace, and that helps a lot. but, it would be easier to do it with a tuned robots.txt like this. I never set up phpbb sites with out PHPBB SEO and a dialed in robots.txt. Hope this helps.
There is no exact figure for this question, way too many variables. Generally every page I've built in the last two years was spidered in the first 2-3 weeks. That's just getting indexed though, no SERPs have ever shown up that quick.