XML Sitemaps and priority values

Priority Values in XML Sitemaps Explained
XML sitemaps protocol was originally created by Google and called Google Sitemaps. Later other search engines such as Yahoo, Ask and MSN adopted the Google Sitemaps format, and Google Sitemaps got renamed into Sitemaps Protocol. Common for both is they define a <priority></priority> tag which can be used by the website owner to help search engines determine which pages are most important.

Quick Facts About Priority Values

Priority values are considered to be relative within your website.
Valid priority values are: 0.0, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, 0.6, 0.7, 0.8, 0.9, 1.0.
Usually your most important page URL will have priority value: 1.0.
Priority of pages in the XML sitemap should decrease after importance.

Priority Values and Search Engine Optimization
Setting priority values can not be considered search engine optimization. You can not set all pages to maximum priority and assume search engines will agree That said, here are some thoughts about how priorities in XML sitemaps are used:

Pages with high priority values are likely to get indexed faster and crawled more often.
Help search engines to decide which url to show if multiple pages from same website rank for search query.
While highly speculative, one can imagine that if a website and XML sitemap is highly trusted, you might be able boost rankings in search engine result pages, just like good internal linking within a website can.

Always ensure you have backlinks, i.e. incoming links. This will improve chances that search engines index and crawl all urls listed in your XML sitemap.

How to Set Priorities in XML Sitemaps
Never use the same priority value for all pages, better to leave priority values out of your XML sitemaps! You can set priority value for all pages manually, but this quickly gets tedious if you have a large website. Alternatively, if you use the XML Sitemaps Generator program A1 Sitemap Generator you can have all priority values calculated. It does so by counting and weighing importance of all internal links within a website and converting this into a priority value for each URL in the XML sitemap.

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Comments

Comment from Arya
Time: January 30, 2008, 10:36 pm

cool! i didn’t know that about site maps.

Comment from Anand
Time: October 4, 2008, 3:09 pm

Thanks for the advice. I was very confused about these priority and change frequency. Now I got understood. Thanks dude.

Comment from افلام
Time: November 11, 2008, 3:49 am

thanks

for the best xml-sitemaps

Comment from Andy
Time: November 15, 2008, 5:27 pm

No wonder if my web suddenly disappear from google page because i set with wrong setting. Thanks for info.

Comment from international importers directory
Time: February 2, 2009, 10:19 pm

Thanks for this article. Now i learnt the importance of priority in xml sitemap.

Comment from Clive
Time: February 6, 2009, 7:20 am

Just because a page has less internal links doesnt always mean it is less important so how do I ask it not to add priority values?

thnx

Comment from admin
Time: February 6, 2009, 7:28 am

A1 Sitemap Generator does not just count links, it also factors in the importance of the pages where those links reside. Anyways, if you want A1 Sitemap Generator not to include priority values do the following: In create sitemap | XML sitemap options enable “Override Priority” and select a minus value. That will leave out the value completely. I will make sure to include this information in the tutorials / help

Comment from b2b
Time: February 12, 2009, 11:27 pm

Is there any priority for Google News XML sitemap? If yes, how to set that?

Comment from admin
Time: February 13, 2009, 3:18 am

Google News sitemap extends the normal XML sitemaps protocol, so priority values are valid in news sitemaps… But I am unsure if Google uses them. A1 Sitemap Generator automatically calculates priority values in news sitemaps (can be disabled in configuration). You can also check this news sitemap tutorial.

Comment from osmar
Time: February 20, 2009, 5:40 am

estou colocando as prioridades, mas quando faço up load, ela coloca todo no xml com o prioridade 0,1 , o que faço para salvar as minhas deficições de prioridades,

Comment from seo
Time: April 3, 2009, 10:56 pm

its better to give low priority to less important pages through sitemap.xml rather than giving them nofollow as it creates orphaned pages in directory.

Comment from hublon
Time: July 23, 2009, 5:37 am

I have encountered a terrible mistake when i set my homepage with 1.0 and posts with 1.0 also. The result is that, only my homepage gets ranked and not my posts. I’m glad I found your article regarding sitemap. thanks again.

Comment from SEO India
Time: July 29, 2009, 12:26 am

Hi,

Nice information on XML Sitemaps priority values, i hope this will help webmaster to understand the exact term and their importance.

Best of Luck

Thanks
Ravi Ranjan Singh

Comment from w9596
Time: August 12, 2009, 12:56 am

What exactly happens if you set no priorities whatsoever? Are they automatically calculated by how many people access the page, or something?

Comment from admin
Time: August 12, 2009, 8:02 am

You mean if you specificly ask sitemap generator tool not to include priority values (caluclated or whatever)… Well, then the search engines decide for themselves. (But priority in XML sitemaps is just one of more/many things they consider when deciding which URLs to index/rank/etc)

Comment from Ray
Time: September 27, 2009, 7:47 pm

Some say priority and frequency settings are important while others claim they are little or no benefit. Lots of mixed reviews and postings on this. Seems nobody knows for sure or can agree.

Comment from Ryan Wheale
Time: November 3, 2009, 10:12 am

I agree with Ray… nobody really seems to know exactly how search engines treat the priority value. Why use something you do not understand? One thing I do know for certain is that google does not like to be fooled, and those who try to fool google get punished.

So consider a “Portfolio” page… you have 10 internal links to this page, 20 inbound links, and strong keyword density… but you gave it a priority of .5 and gave your “About Us” page a priority of 1.0 since it talks all about you and your services. However, nobody on the web is linking to your “About Us” page, and you only 2 internal links to this page. I don’t know about you, but if I were google, I would feel like you were trying to give priority to a page that didn’t deserve it. I might even punish you for trying to fool me… just my honest opinion.

Comment from admin
Time: November 3, 2009, 10:36 am

In that case we probably agree that automatic priority calculation is best calculated using internal links like A1 Sitemap Generator does

About update frequency, it’s true A1SG bases it partly on priority if it can’t find any appropriate meta tags or similar describing update frequency. However, people can leave out the update frequency tag entirely when creating XML sitemaps if they so wish

Comment from George Elliott
Time: February 13, 2010, 9:52 am

How do I leave out the priority and change frequency tags?

Comment from admin
Time: February 13, 2010, 11:45 am

Enable “Override” and set “ChangeFreq” value to “*”
Enable “Override” and set “Priority” value to minus.

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