What is the practical influence of priority in a sitemap?
-
I have a directory site with 1000s of entries. Will there be benefit to be gained from playing with various entries priorities in the sitemap? I was thinking I might give more priority to entries that have upgraded their directory entry.
Thanks.
-
Thanks Keri!
-
JohnMu, a Google employee, answered this on the Google help forums last month.
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=74fb248959989911&hl=en
I wouldn't worry too much about the "priority" values. If you're able to generate them based on useful information from your website, then it's a good idea to do that. If you can't automatically generate them and have too many pages to set the values manually, then it's fine to submit the Sitemap file without "priority" information. The "priority" value gives us a bit more information about your site, but changing values here generally won't lead to visible changes in crawling, indexing, or ranking overall.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google Image Search - Is there a way to influence the related icons at the top of the image search results?
Google recently added related icons at the top of the image search results page. Some of the icons may be unrelated to the search. Are there any best practices to influence what is positioned in the related image icons section? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JaredBroussard1 -
Whats the best practice for acquisition?
Hi, My company have just bought out a competitor. We wan't to dissolve their website and if possible steal some of their link juice. The site hasn't got any spammy links or 404's so i'm not worried in that department. What I am not sure about is which of the following is best practice? a. Redirect every single page (even pages like /?checkout) to a relevant page on our website. b. Only redirect important pages, category pages, contact pages etc and leave the other pages to 404? c. Redirect the important pages to a relevant URL and redirect the less important pages to our homepage. d. Redirect the entire domain to our home page (i assume this isn't a good idea) e. Don't redirect any of the pages just delete the site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DannyHoodless0 -
Sitemap Indexed Pages, Google Glitch or Problem With Site?
Hello, I have a quick question about our Sitemap Web Pages Indexed status in Google Search Console. Because of the drastic drop I can't tell if this is a glitch or a serious issue. When you look at the attached image you can see that under Sitemaps Web Pages Indexed has dropped suddenly on 3/12/17 from 6029 to 540. Our Index status shows 7K+ indexed. Other than product updates/additions and homepage layout updates there have been no significant changes to this website. If it helps we are operating on the Volusion platform. Thanks for your help! -Ryan rou1zMs
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rrhansen0 -
Top SEO Influencers 2015
Hello! I'm doing a little bit of research into key SEO players and thought I would get some opinions from the Moz community. Who's your go-to SEO guru? Who's up-and-coming in the world of SEO? Who are your favourite SEO influencers on Twitter? Cheers, Lewis
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeaSoupDigital0 -
Google News sitemap keywords
My company is a Theater news and reviews site. We're building a google news sitemap and Google suggests some recommended keywords we can use with their <keywords>tag: https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/116037</keywords> Our writers also tag their stories with relevant keywords. What should we populate the <keywords>tag with?</keywords> We were thinking we'd automatically populate it with author-added tags, in addition to one or more of the recommended ones suggested by Google, such as Theater, Arts, and Culture (all of our articles are related to these topics). Finally, many of our articles are about say, celebrities. An author may tag an article with 'Bryan Cranston,' and when this is the case we're considering also tagging it with the 'Celebrities' tag. Are all or any of these worthwhile?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheaterMania0 -
Google Processing but Not Indexing XML Sitemap
Like it says above, Google is processing but not indexing our latest XML sitemap. I noticed this Monday afternoon - Indexed status was still Pending - and didn't think anything of it. But when it still said Pending on Tuesday, it seemed strange. I deleted and resubmitted our XML sitemap on Tuesday. It now shows that it was processed on Tuesday, but the Indexed status is still Pending. I've never seen this much of a lag, hence the concern. Our site IS indexed in Google - it shows up with a site:xxxx.com search with the same number of pages as it always has. The only thing I can see that triggered this is Sunday the site failed verification via Google, but we quickly fixed that and re-verified via WMT Monday morning. Anyone know what's going on?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingof50 -
Bing Webmaster Tools failed to reach sitemap any suggestions?
My sitemap has been submitted to Bing webmaster tools well over a year ago and I have never had any problems. Starting last week it showed failed, for some reason it can't reach it. I have resubmitted several times and it fails every time. I can go to the url with no problems, and Google Webmaster Tools does not have any problems. We have made no changes in over a year to how the sitemap is made and submitted. Anyone have any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Sitemaps: Alternate hreflang
Hi, some time ago I have read that there is a limit of 50.000 URLs per sitemap file (So, you need to create a sitemap index and separate files with 50.000 urls each). [Source]. Now we are about to implement the link hreflang in the sitemap [Source], and we dont know if we have to count each alternate as a different url. We have 21 different well positioned domains (Same name, different cctlds, a little different content [varies in currencies, taxes, some labels, etc] depending in the target country) so the amount of links per url would be high. A) Shall we count each link alternate as a separate url, or just the original ones? For example, if we have to count the link alternates, that would make us have 2380pages per sitemap, each with one original url and 20 alternate links. (Always being aware of the 50mb maximum filesize) B) Actually we have one sitemap per domain. Using this, shall we generate one per domain using the matching domain as original url? Or it would be the same if we upload to every domain the same sitemap? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marianoSoler980