Sitemap priority?

My website has three hierarchical levels:

Frontpage
Sub-frontpages
and products

My frontpage has a priority of 1.0 and the rest the site has a priority of 0.1.
Is it OK to have such a low priority for non-frontpage pages?
Should I increase the priority of non-frontpage pages?

Thanks in advance.

 

I read that the default is 0.5 for all pages and then the algorithms are run to increase/decrease the rest.

I have my front page as 1.0 and some other more important pages as 0.8 and the rest at 0.5. The webmaster dashboard in Google does not give any information about the priority that Google assigns any pages. I think that they should. I would like to know if this has any effect.

I would not feel safe putting a 0.1 on any pages for the priority. You might be hurting those pages, but probably not. I don't think they would decrease your placement in the search engines.

 

To set same priority (e.g. 0.5 or 1.0) for all pages is at best meaningless. Programs such as A1 Sitemap Generator can calculate priority for all pages based on your internal linking. However, if that is not what you want, you should either set priority values manually or leave them out! You can check this sitemaps priority article for more information.

 

Alright, thanks for that article. I should probably update my sitemap a bit. It is probably causing more harm than good right now.

 

Thanks both of you.
Very good article.