Everyone seems to be raving about the wonderful new "XML Sitemaps Standard", that was created by Google, and is now being adopted by Yahoo and MSN. To me, this new standard raises some questions. 1. OLD FACTORS - Historically, the search engine spiders have determined the factors of URL NAME<url> and LOCATION<loc>. Now, you are asked to specify these two parameters. ***SEARCH ENGINE SPECIFIC FACTORS - Each search engine will treat the following tags differently, just like they do everything else. Will the accuracy of these variable factors contribute to, or be influenced by, your "trust factor"?*** 2. TIME STAMP <lastmod> - Will the frequency of updating your XML sitemap become a factor? Will frequent XML sitemap updates result in better indexing? Each SE will have its own opinion. How often should you update your XML file? Daily? Weekly? After you have just updated a file tagged "monthly", should you immediately submit a new XML sitemap, with new timestamp, to ensure the fastest indexing possible? This could be a real pain. 3. CRAWL FREQUENCY FACTOR <changefreq> - Always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly? This will be different for every file on your site. Should you be conservative, and specify a little less frequently than real life? Or should you be aggressive, and specify a little more frequently than actual? 4. IMPORTANCE FACTOR <priority> - You must specify an "importance factor", from 0.0 to 10.0. This is highly subjective. It allows for 100 different levels of "importance". I think that is too many. Should you be conservative, accurate, or aggressive? Aggressive webmasters may specify 10.0 for all their pages, thinking that to be the best action . Will they be penalized for not following the "spirit" of the tag. Conservative webmasters may specify 6 for all pages. Will this hurt them, for lack of "drive"? Should their pages be considered less important? Will these differences eventually cause the importance of the tag to be ignored, due to a lack of consistency? Again, each SE will interpret YOUR judgment differently. 5. Adoption Time - How long will it be before the first search engine DEMANDS that every website has an XML Sitemap, to be listed in their index. Will this ever happen? My actions - Setting all the <changefreq> and <priority> tags ACCURATELY, for every file, is just not feasible. Since I have no clue (yet), I am opting for the conservative approach. I set ALL my change frequencies to weekly, and all my priorities to 5.0. Is this good or bad? To summarize, I'm not so sure about this "wonderful" new development. It could be a massive time consumer, with unclear advantages for the webmaster. In the fullness of time, all these questions will be answered. Right now, we must guess. .
If you set the same priority value for all pages, you can just as well leave it out. (my opinion anyways) Check out this article about priority values in xml sitemaps Short: If you use priority values in XML sitemaps, use values that indiciate relative importance within your website.
I figure the homepage / main product / information page should be 1.0, other important pages (that you can also make money on / have good info) should be 0.8, contact / company info pages should be 0.6 and old archived pages should be 0 - 0.4 but that's just me... Jk
I'm sorry about that incorrect "100 levels" comment about priority. You guys are quite right - I see now that it is indeed 10 levels. (I see that I must now go back, and change all of those .66 values I typed in.) Thomas - "If you set the same priority value for all pages, you can just as well leave it out." Good point, why bother? Unless you want to emphasize that ALL of your pages are NOT important. Hah! Marking ALL your pages 10, may not be looked at positively. "I figure the homepage / main product / information page should be 1.0, other important pages (that you can also make money on / have good info) should be 0.8, contact / company info pages should be 0.6 and old archived pages should be 0 - 0.4 . ." Yeah, that sounds about right. Now if the big 3 could formalize those guidelines, that would be great. Or we could continue to guess. I like the numbers you suggested, generaltomfoolery.