Newest info on sitemaps from google

Since today google sitemaps gives warning to everyones sitemaps like this one :

Line Status Details
- All the URLs in your Sitemap have the same priority.
All the URLs in your Sitemap are set to the same priority (not the default priority). Priority indicates the importance of a particular URL relative to other URLs on your site, and doesn't impact your site's performance in search results. If all URLs have the same priority, Google can't tell which are more important. Found: Jun 22, 2008

So better hurry and change your url priorities in your sitemaps

 

How do you do that?

 

You can either do that manually or through a sitemap generator tool. My site has 10k urls in the sitemap, what i do is just set the priority to a default number (0.5) and after generating the initial sitemap, I just manually change some pages that I consider more important than the other pages (home page, top products, etc.)

 

I use a script that automates the priority based on link depth of the pages.

 

if one uses wordpress and Google Sitemap Generator Plugin then there is no problem coz it will automatically allocate required priority to each link..
To see the example check http://regtweak.info/sitemap.xml

 

A1 Sitemap Generator has always from the beginning calculated priorities based on your internal linking. It weighs the importance of all links and calculates priority values based on that.

 

There is no point in hurrying here to do any thing in priorities.

Google controls what they do vis a vis priorities you assign - they can completely ignore them. All they are is suggestions from you as to what YOU FEEL is highest priority on your site - and frequency of changes - but they do not force the GoogleBot to do anything.

I have spoken to people at Google, and the general feeling is that priorities are of little value - and that they use their own algorithms to determine what to crawl with what frequency. The reason is that site owners get it wrong - thinking that what they set will get them crawled more.

The MAIN VALUE - of site maps - is to make sure GoogleBot actually knows about all pages in your site... This can be CRITICAL - if you use Javascript or Flash to generate some menu structures - because it makes sure google knows about pages that might otherwise not have clear links that the GoogleBot would crawl too.

Just put your honest best guess of correct priorities for pages on your site and leave it at that. Trying to game this will not get you anything - and will just waste your time...

 

Good link to the A1 Sitemap, thank you.

 

any good free ones i use sitemap .net which is ok need a better one that can change the priorety

 

www.xml-sitemaps.com has a free online generator that automatically prioritises your pages based on link depths but the free version is limited to 500 pages.

 

I too wonder the value of over optimizing the feed to make sure zero errors show up. It would seem to me people who choose to over optimize are either spammers or early adapters and Google values content over both.

 

Your priority shouldn't be the same anyway. Good move by google to be honest. It would work out better for your site as well.

 

What if I don't mention priority in my website sitemap??

 

I am new to sitemaps, i downloaded loads of sitemap makers which were poor to say the least. I just started using A1 Sitemap Generator so just wanted to say a quick thanks to ThomasSchulz (if its your software!). And yes the software sets the priorities for me.

 

The best suggestion is to just delete your sitemap's and internally link your site properly to begin with.

 

I agree. Internal linking is so much more helpful. But the sitemap being there is just an added advantage. Usually, websites with a sitemap get indexed faster. But further indexing happens better with internal linking. IMHO