Google Sitemap - What is "Priority" ??

[Shaun(OfTheDead)]

What is the "priority" value in a Google Sitemap file for ??

It seems to take decimals from 0.1 to 0.5 ... Which is the highest, and from experience which is the best way to assign these ??

Many thanks.

[Shaun(OfTheDead)]

hmm... Okay don't bother, I found something on it...

Originally Posted by Google Webmaster Tools

The priority of this URL relative to other URLs on your site. Valid values range from 0.0 to 1.0. This value has no effect on your pages compared to pages on other sites, and only lets the search engines know which of your pages you deem most important so they can order the crawl of your pages in the way you would most like.

The default priority of a page is 0.5.

Please note that the priority you assign to a page has no influence on the position of your URLs in a search engine's result pages. Search engines use this information when selecting between URLs on the same site, so you can use this tag to increase the likelihood that your more important pages are present in a search index.

Also, please note that assigning a high priority to all of the URLs on your site will not help you. Since the priority is relative, it is only used to select between URLs on your site; the priority of your pages will not be compared to the priority of pages on other sites.

[HAWK]

Just as well. I had NO idea.

[Shaun(OfTheDead)]

Fair enough.

Here's another one for you...

Did you know that you can add a line to your robots.txt file to auto-submit your sitemap??

http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000437.html

This (allegedly) works for Google, Yahoo and even Ask. I stumbled upon it while researching this.