Recently (oh well, fairly anyway) we got the sitemap feature to inform G of our pages. In those sitemaps we can assign a number for the importance of the pages. G tells us that this number will be used to decide between similar pages on our site but nothing else. But... ...will they use this information as part of the PR algo? Will a link from a more important page count for more than another less important (same incoming PR assumed)? That is, will your outgoing PR shift from pages marked as "less important" to more "important" pages? This seems like a natural step for me (ie I got the idea why would they not). I have no idea how this would change our behaviour or strategies. Would it?
I'm not so sure I'd leave it up to the webmaster to decide the importance of pages. Everyone will jjust mark their pages as the most important, obviously.
But you can only rank a page in relation to your other pages. You say something like "on this site this page is twice as important as the other pages".
It would seem to make sense to me for Google to add this into their big algo melting pot. It probably won't be as highly ranked as other factors, but could be used to determine the landing page when there are several similar pages on a site.
Hmm this was an interesting question. But as only a very small percantage of webmasters has this I don't think they can integrate variables from it in a big system like the PageRank. When I submitted I made all pages 0.5, the important ones (index etc.) 1.0 and the not so important 0.1. I actually think it is a smart move of Google.
If this is what you're referring to then no: https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/faq.html#rank 7. Will participating in this program change my pages' ranking in Google search results? No. Using Google Sitemaps will not influence your PageRank; there will be no change in how we calculate the ranking of your pages.
again, why would you make a page on your site less important than any other page? they are all of equal importance, i guess.
Not really, some pages may make much more sense as landing pages than others - something friendly with easy navagation, rather than a technical specifications sheet for example.
My understanding is that the ranking affects the crawl rate and nothing else. And yes, I would expect them to normalize the numbers for you. So, if you set them ALL to 1.0, they would normalize them ALL to 0.5. Those of us who set our normally changing pages to 0.5, the rarely to .1 and the rapidly changing ones to 1.0 would actually derive some benefit from it. Those who set them all to MAX, GIMME, GIMME would get nothing from it.
I think it is good to give a higher rating of importance to pages which change often you may be right, but maybe your 'home', index, port-of-entry page deserves a 1.0 after all, that page is probably the hierarchical first link in the chain