Priority Attribute in XML Sitemaps - Still Valid?
-
Is the priority value (scale of 0-1) used for each URL in an XML sitemap still a valid way of communicating to search engines which content you (the webmaster) believe is more important relative to other content on your site?
I recall hearing that this was no longer used, but can't find a source.
If it is no longer used, what are the easiest ways to communicate our preferences to search engines? Specifically, I'm looking to preference the most version version of a product's documentation (version 9) over the previous version (version 8).
Thanks!
-
Thanks Peter, I appreciate you tracking that down!
-
Here is it:
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-priority-change-frequency-xml-sitemap-20273.htmlJust as John Mueller suggest you should use lastmod attribute to indicate change http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html and then you can do sitemap ping to Google for reindexing. This is easy http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=URLOFSITEMAP.xml and it's allowed https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/183669?hl=en
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Paginated category pages still showing in Google
Despite our blog using rel=next and rel=”prev” we’re still finding paginated pages getting impressions in Google, suggesting they are taking up unnecessary crawl budget. An example is: https://www.theukdomain.uk/seo/page/2/ What steps would you recommend I take to most benefit my sites SEO? Thanks, Sam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sjefferies0 -
Is it still true that 3xx redirects don't cause you to lose any ranking?
In this: https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo it says that simply redirecting - provided you don't change anything on the page - isn't going to cost you rankings. Is this still true, or is there any new data/case studies that have been done since? I haven't seen anything updating it and just want to make sure because it's from 2016. We want to do simple 301 redirecting without any changes to the page. Or has anyone had an opposite experience?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AngieJohnston1 -
What’s the best way to handle multiple website languages in terms of metatags that should be used and pages sent on our sitemap?
Hey everyone, Has anyone here worked with SEO + website translations? When should we use canonical or alternate tag if we want the user to find our page on the language he used on Google? Should we send all pages on all the different locales on the sitemap? Looking forward to hearing from you! Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | allanformigoni0 -
301's - Do we keep the old sitemap to assist google with this ?
Hello Mozzers, We have restructured our site and have done many 301 redirects to our new url structure. I have seen one of my competitors have done similar but they have kept the old sitemap to assist google I guess with their 301's as well. At present we only have our new site map active but am I missing a trick by not have the old one there as well to assist google with 301's. thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Using Canonical Attribute
Hi All, I am hoping you can help me? We have recently migrated to the Umbraco CMS and now have duplicate versions of the same page showing on different URLs. My understanding is that this is one of the major reasons for the rel=canonical tag. So am I right in saying that if I add the following to the page that I want to rank then this will work? I'm just a little worried as I have read some horror stories of people implementing this attribute incorrectly and getting into trouble. Thank you in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Creditsafe0 -
Dev Site Out of SERP But Still Indexed
One of our dev sites get indexed (live site robots.txt was moved to it, that has been corrected) 2-3 weeks ago. I immediately added it to our Webmaster Tools and used the Remove URL tool to get the whole thing out of the SERPs. A site:devurl search in Google now returns no results, but checking Index Status in WMT shows 2,889 pages of it still indexed. How can I get all instances of it completely removed from Google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingof50 -
Mobile Sitemaps
We are planning on creating a mobile site using a different URL. Our current sitemap creator won't dynamically detect mobile pages using the rel="alternate" tag but can can create a Project for that domain in Sitemap Creator and use the "mobile" option when you export it. The Sitemap Creator will then insert the mobile:mobilecontent tag for all the URLs in that sitemap. </mobile:mobile> Is this okay or will it cause problems?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
Why is Google Still Penalizing My Site?
We got hit pretty hard by Penguin. There were some bad link issues which we've cleared up and we also had a pretty unique situation stemming from about a year ago when we changed the name of the company and created a whole new site with similar content under a different URL. We used the same phone number and address, and left the old site up as it was still performing well. Google didn't care for that so we eventually used 301 redirects to push the link juice from the old site to the new site. That's the background, here's the problem...... We've partially recovered, but there are several keywords that haven't come back anywhere near where they were in Google. We have higher page rank and more links than our competition and are performing in the top 5 for some of our keywords. Other, similar keywords, where we used to be in the top 5, we are now down on page 4 or 5. Our website is www.hudsoncabinetrydesign.com. We build custom cabinetry and furniture in Westchester County, NY just north of NYC. Examples - For "custom built-ins new york" we are number 3 on Google, number 1 on Bing/Yahoo. For "custom kitchen cabinetry ny" we are number 3 on Bing/Yahoo, not in the top 50 on Google. For "custom radiator covers ny" we used to be #1 on Google, are currently #48, currently #2 on Bing/Yahoo. Obviously, we've done something to upset the Google, but we've run out of ideas as to what it could be. Any ideas as to what is going on? Thanks so much for your feedback, Doug B.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | doug_b0