Priority Tag in Sitemaps
The <priority> tag is used in XML sitemaps, by the webmaster,
to signal the importance of individual pages in the website to Google and other search engines.
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How to decide sitemap priority values:
- Priority values are relative within your website.
- Valid priority values have range interval [0.0, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, 0.6, 0.7, 0.8, 0.9, 1.0].
- This means that the priority of your most important page should be [1.0].
- The priority of other pages in the XML sitemap should decrease after importance.
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Search engines using the priority tag:
- Google XML sitemaps. Later evolved into XML sitemaps protocol.
- XML sitemaps protocol. Now used by Google, Yahoo, Ask, MSN etc.
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Get the best XML sitemaps effect:
- Make sure you have some incoming links. This will "motivate" search engines to index and crawl all urls in your sitemap.
Priorities in XML Sitemaps
Sitemap priority values and how they can affect search engines:
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Website crawlers and bots:
- Likely Pages with high priority values get crawled more often.
- Likely For new websites, help guide crawlers which pages to index first.
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Search engine result pages (SERPs):
- Likely Help determine which url to show if multiple pages from a website match a query.
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Search engine results and ranking algorithms:
- Speculative If website and XML sitemap is trusted, influence ranking and position in search results.
- As comparison, it is also possible to boost rankings using SEO linking techniques within a website.
- Unlikely You can use XML sitemaps as a direct search engine optimization (SEO) technique.
Software Calculated Priority Values in XML Sitemaps
It can be a slow process to set priority values for all URLs in XML sitemaps. Therefore:
- XML sitemap goals:
- Priority values calculated represent what the webmaster finds important
- This implies that data used in calculations should be website specific.
- Calculating priority values for all pages thereby saving time for the webmaster.
- XML sitemap methods and algorithms used:
- External sources (number of backlinks, Google PageRank etc.)
- Using external sources can not represent the opinion of the webmaster.
- There is often an overweight of backlinks pointing to domain address / welcome page instead of product page.
- Conclusions:
- Not the best way. Data resembles external resources and not webmaster.
- Internal linking of pages in website
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How A1 Sitemap Generator calculates sitemap priorities:
- Importance calculation for all pages in website:
- All pages have the number of incoming links from within the website processed and counted.
Example: Page has 50 incoming links and 25 onpage links.
- All links and pages are processed and calculated again for link rank page power.
- A link passes on a higher score value if it resides on a page with few onpage links and many incoming links.
Example: Page has 50 incoming links and 25 onpage, therefore each link passes a rank power score value of 2.
- After this, the score is scaled based on a logarihm. Example: If scaled value "10" equals a page power of "100", "9" equals "50".
- Adjust priority calculations with following options:
- Options | URL importance algorithm | Links "noself". Links from page "A" to "A" (i.e. itself) do not count.
- Options | URL importance algorithm | Links "reduce". Each link from page "A" to "B" counts less and less.
Conclusions
- No effort for webmaster to set priority for all pages in a sitemap.
- Will in most cases reflect what the webmaster finds most important.
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