A few General XML Questions

HTML & CSS
1

I have a couple of car dealers…the XML map is auto generated evertime the page is loaded. Now a few questions.

  1. I have the ability to set the “Change Frequency” to daily, weekly, and monthly. What is this useful for? Obviously I would want the important pages that are updated more often to be set at daily or weekly right?

  2. I can change the “Priority Level” 0-100. What good is this. Should they all have the same priority level? Should some have 50% priority while other more important have 75%?

Also Google never crawls my car inventory…or it will crawl a coupld of cars while there are hundreds that go uncrawled. How can I get the car listing crawled more? Should I mix up the order of the XML map so the stuff at the top changes. Because right now it is always the same order?

Here is an example:
http://www.jaguarmarin.com/sitemap.xml

2

Unless Google has changed, the last I knew those were more “suggestions” than “instructions” and Google may or may not use the info in it’s crawls. So I wouldn’t worry about getting those too precise, just close enough should be good enough.

As long as all the page’s URLs are included in the sitemap and can be found by following links, it seems Google should eventually crawl them. If the site’s new, be patient, it takes some time.

3

From the sitemaps specification:

The priority of this URL relative to other URLs on your site. Valid values range from 0.0 to 1.0. This value does not affect how your pages are compared to pages on other sites—it only lets the search engines know which pages you deem most important for the crawlers.
The default priority of a page is 0.5.
Please note that the priority you assign to a page is not likely to influence the position of your URLs in a search engine’s result pages. Search engines may use this information when selecting between URLs on the same site, so you can use this tag to increase the likelihood that your most important pages are present in a search index.
Also, please note that assigning a high priority to all of the URLs on your site is not likely to help you. Since the priority is relative, it is only used to select between URLs on your site.

What this means is that if you have pages which are more essential (and need indexing more regularly or before all others) you should make use of the priority tag and assign it a value between 0 (0%) and 1 (100%) - the specification uses decimal points, not percentages so your reference is incorrect (or unsemantic at least). As for frequency, it states if you want Google and the other engines to “check out” your content between certain times (such as once a day only), it won’t increase the spiders visit times, but it will limit the amount of time a page can be indexed (so it’s best to leave it out if you don’t need a delay) :slight_smile:

PS: Mittineague your post makes no sense :stuck_out_tongue: