Priority Scores in Sitemap

Hi,

I've been advised that giving your pages a relevant priority score in a google sitemap is very important.

Currently I have about 30 pages listed in my sitemap all with a 0.5 priority rating.

Logic tells me that i should giver a higher score to the more important pages such as the home page, but what is the most effective way to do this? i.e. what is the maximum rating you should give a single page and how many pages can you give high rating to?

Does anyone have any knowledge on the best way to distribute the ratings amonst the pages?

 

I don't expect this will have much of an effect. Put your important pages as the maximum and the less important ones lower I expect.

 

Just use a site map generator that calculates
and assigns priority values, e.g. like done in:
http://www.micro-sys.dk/sitemap.xml

For documentation details:
http://www.micro-sys.dk/products/sitemap-generator/help/website-data-collected-sitemap.html
http://www.micro-sys.dk/products/sitemap-generator/help/create-build-sitemap-google.html

Other people can probably pitch in if they know other tools that calculate priority values.

 

It is tough to accurately calculate the priority. Most services that calculate the priority use PageRank (also on a scale of 10), but the two really aren't that similar. What the Priority suggests is how important your pages are compared to other pages on your site...

This may not be what Google intended, but if Google only had time to index 3 of your pages this month.... which ones would you want to be indexed first?

Use this as a guide and your priority ranks should come out correctly.

 

Just to clarify, I do not use Google PageRank to set priority. That said, the calculations done are probably somewhat similar. I think for most sites it gives a pretty good results.

Imagine you have a product catalog and 10 products. If you could only get one thing included, it would (logically) be the product catalog, right? And most linking structures will automatically give the product catalog a higher priority/rank/power.

Under all circumstances, I am quite satisfied with the priories generated for my website, but you are correct, it is not necessarily perfect for all websites

 

Thank you for the advice and for the example.

I'm going to make priority changes to the xml sitemap today and monitor changes over the the next few weeks to see if i notice any changes.