sitemap priorities?

Hi Christian,

The priority, by definition, is a suggestion in which order the pages or posts should be crawled.
This shouldn’t affect SEO, however, it can affect the order of which the pages are crawled.

The XML tag definitions are well documented here.

The priority goes from 0.0 to 1.0, with 1.0 being the highest.

A lower priority doesn’t make the Search Engine refuse the page in question, and it won’t lower its ranking.
The ranking is based on the content, the bounce rate, the layout and so much more — but the sitemap does not play a factor.

Reasoning the numbers
The priority of the home page is always 1. As in almost all cases we want Search Engines to crawl this the most often.
The pages should represent a static resource for information. Which explain what the website is about, what your goals are, etc. This priority, if changed, is in most cases also very important. Therefore I’ve set this to 0.9.

For posts, it’s counting the total amount of posts, and that number is taken to make the steps from 0.9 to 0.0.

N is the amount of posts.
$difference = 0.9 / N

If there are fewer than 10 posts, the difference is always 0.1.

What does help
The “lastmod” time, is by definition the time you’ve edited the post. Search Engines like Google hold a record for this data and compares it on the next visit. If they see a change, they’ll revisit the page — regardless of the priority. I see you’ve disabled “lastmod” for the sitemap, but enabled them on posts (social settings). This will enable them solely for posts in the sitemap. Which is OK.

Still want to influence this?
This plugin works alongside The SEO Framework (or the other way around). Nevertheless, that plugin allows you to have more control over the priorities, for as far as I can remember.

I hope this clears things up! And have a great day :).

Fantastic!

Thanks for the thorough answer…

Although – and this has nothing to do with you ou the seo framework – I’m at a loss as to why there is such a discrepancy in priorities for pages that are theoretically equal in “importance” on content or location in the site’s hierarchy…

Which brings me to ask a couple of questions:

– While setting the priorities is probably not an issue, if I do install the google sitemap generator, will it not conflict with your settings? Whatever the answer to that, would you recommend any settings in seo framework in this scenario?

– I’m slowly catching on to the modern SEO optimisation work. I have however run into an issue that has me stuck: The site is referenced moderately well for most subjects although rarely in position 1 on first page in google. Setting up my clinic in google maps has done more than actual SEO within the site. I have however not found a way to get (aggressively ?? ) cross referenced for nearby locations: searching for certain keywords in areas just a couple of Km away brings no results. The funny thing is, In the “old days” I had done a little referencing with a gentle touch of page “spamming” and signed the site up in a few directories with fantastic results (2 first pages of google filled with exclusively my pages!)
sooooo:

Do you have any hints on how I could optimise this without flooding the page with irrelevant keywords (adjacent locations) that Google might detect ( potentially downgrading my page rank…) I know this is slightly off topic on the SEO plugin but on-topic on SEO!!

Thanks again

Christian

Hi Christian,

Anytime :)!

The priority is only set for prioritizing the rate of indexing.
The lower the priority, the later the Search Engine should crawl it. It’s a guideline, not a rule.
But when crawled, all content is treated on its own — regardless the sitemap’s priority settings.
Old posts are treated as “outdated”, “no longer of relevance” or simply “not of the current hype”. In almost all cases, it’s better to index these later.

When you post a lot of content, it’s also easier for the Search Engine to see what’s new, with the higher priority. A staircase-like priority setting will even help in these cases.

But, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter &mash; at all. Unless you’re a News provider like LA Times, CNN, Fox/Yahoo/MSN News, etc.

When using another sitemap plugin, like the one I linked to before, nothing has to be done. The detection of sitemap plugins is done automatically within The SEO Framework and you’ll receive a small notification within the SEO Sitemap Settings. Just be sure to check out the robots.txt settings to see if anything’s duplicated.

On the topic of Geo targeting, that’s a great way which should still work! Alas, not all nearby regions are covered at all times.
I’d suggest adding texts like “5 minute drive from Brussels” and “around the corner of Leuven”, things like that :). It’s subtle, but may just work.

Other tips can be found here.
Some testing tools like Nibbler should also give a great idea of what can be improved :).

I hope this clears things up! If you are still uncertain, let me know :). Have a great day!

It appears you have removed Sitemap Priorities. Is that correct?

Why not make it an advanced option so folks who were using them can continue. I was using the priority field in the sitemap to assist with my cache refresher.

I do not think you should assume that Google is the only consumer of a sitemap since anyone can use them and priority can be very useful to other applications.

I guess I am voting for supporting them even if it is a advanced option to turn it on.

Hi @miner,

They were never removed… maybe there is something going wrong?

Could you open up a new topic if you still find this issue, with a link to the sitemap in question?

Thanks!

Hi Sybre, thanks for your quick response. I was refering to Yoast SEO, but I realize that this is a different plugin, so I retract my comment.

I will look into this plugin though.

Thanks,

Dave

Hi Sybre, I have switched from Yoast to your plugin this AM and am happy so far, but wanted to know how you are coming up with the Sitemap priority and how I can change the values for each page or base it on site hierarchy.

Do I have any control over Priority values?

Thanks,

Dave

Hi Dave,

As I mentioned earlier in this post:

A lower priority doesn’t make the Search Engine refuse the page in question, and it won’t lower its ranking.
The ranking is based on the content, the bounce rate, the layout and so much more — but the sitemap does not play a factor.

In essence, this means that there are no plans to change this value; because, it doesn’t have any effect.

To continue:

The priority is only set for prioritizing the rate of indexing.
The lower the priority, the later the Search Engine should crawl it. It’s a guideline, not a rule.
But when crawled, all content is treated on its own — regardless the sitemap’s priority settings.

In other words:
The sitemap helps Search Engines find new posts and pages. Not old ones. They’re ignored, unless the lastmod entry changes.

There’s some calculation going on for the post/page priority output. This calculation is perfect for most — if not all — websites.

Even more importantly:
With calculating the sitemap’s output, there’s a lot of memory and processing power used.
When we increase this rate onward to entry-specific filters and options, there’s a lot more usage, this might even double.

Most users have to work with shared hosting that does rate-limiting, process-limiting, and only provide 64MB of RAM — and to top it off — on PHP 5.3 without caching and a run-time limit of 15 seconds… In the end this means that on a bad day the sitemap may completely fail to complete its render when we add too much.

Conclusion:
There’s nothing that needs or can be changed. Unless we move to a sitemap index structure.

I want to call out that this is a support forum, and this means it’s a very bad place for discussing topics — especially since this post is 10 months old and can “actually” only be found through Google. www.remarpro.com renders these topics “no longer relevant”.
Also, I believe we’re bothering the topic starter, so for the future I’d like to ask you to open up a new topic.

If you wish to continue on this topic, there’s a better place to do so, i.e. GitHub:
https://github.com/sybrew/the-seo-framework/issues/new

On GitHub people do read the discussions and would love to respond if they’re savvy on the subject or have a strong opinion ??
There we can also set schedules if needed.

I hope this wall of text clears things up! I’d love to hear more of your opinion, even though it’s not feasible in the current structure.

Cheers!