The Importance Of The Priority Tag In Google Sitemaps

I’m sure most of you all have heard and even use sitemaps on your sites right? Well, I just want to take the time here to stress how important the priority tag in it is to search engines, particularly Google. The importance of correctly setting the priority tag in your sitemap.

At first I didn’t really care much about the priority tag in my sitemap, letting the the Google sitemap generator plugin in Wordpress do automatic priority calculation for my site when I upgraded it. So the plugin did it’s job, calculating the priority values for pages and posts in my site – my posts got assigned a priority value of about 3 to 4 while tags and categories got assigned a value of 6 to 8. At that time I didn’t understand what the priority tag in the Google sitemap meant so I left it be, trusting the plugins automatic calculations and ignoring the voice in my head telling me that the priority of URL’s in my sitemap  were actually all manually set at 1 before.

A few days later I noticed there was an extremely sharp drop in traffic from search engines. Keywords which I used to rank number 1 in were no longer bringing in traffic. I found this really strange as the keyword I was ranking number 1 in was quite a popular keyword and had been bringing in traffic quite consistently. I did a quick search on Google and found out that the post that used to rank number 1 in it was no longer ranked number 1. I added the word “drett” after the keyword and searched on Google again only to find that only a category of my site was indexed. The previous posts was nowhere to be found within the Google search index.

To confirm what I thought had happened, I did a quick search on Google for the pages of my site and this was what I got:

Notice that no posts was listed, only tags, categories and archives.

The first few pages of the result were all filled with tags, categories and my archives, the posts were at the last few pages. I immediately connected the situation with something to do with the priority tag settings in my sitemap and went and set the priority in my sitemap to be all the same for all posts, category, tag and pages.

After 2 days (today), I found that my previous keywords were once again bringing in traffic. I did another search on Google for the pages and posts indexed in my site to see whether there was any difference.

Notice that some of my posts are now included on the frontpage.

After looking at the results, I found that more of my posts were located on the frontpage, which is a good thing. There were still a few categories that ranked higher than my posts which I think that I will be able to fix once I set the priority of the categories lower in my sitemap. If you are wondering why I want my posts to rank higher than all my categories and tags, it’s because my posts contain more content and keywords thus ranking higher in search engines than my categories and pages.

I did a little bit more research on the priority tag on Google and found out that the priority of the URL is relative to other URL’s in your site and that the priority you assign to a URL has no direct influence on the position of your URL on the Google search engine. Although the priority has no direct influence on the position of the URL in the Google search engine, I found out that the priority tag influences the likelihood that your more important pages are indexed in the search engines results. When I my posts had a lower priority than my categories and tags, the Google search engine decided to include my categories and tags into it’s search results instead of my posts. This didn’t directly affect the position of URL’s in the search engine, however after running my categories and tags through whatever Google uses to rank pages, my categories could not rank as high as my posts thus appearing in the search engine’s index but not has high as my posts. This then directly affected the position of my URL’s in the Google search engine.

I’m still experimenting a bit with how the sitemap influences the inclusion of posts and pages of my site in Google’s search results, however I feel that it is safe to manually set all URL’s to a priority of 1 in the sitemap.

So, just to remind you all again, please do check the priority settings of the URL’s in your sitemap, as they might be limiting the amount of traffic you get from search engines .

Note: I do think that the priority tag has the same influence on all search engines but maybe I didn’t feel the affects of it as the other search engines might not have detected the change in priority of the URL’s in my sitemap.

Post is brought to you by Beer Openers

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Chi.mp Invites Giveaway

Chi.mp is a new solution on managing your online identity. It gives you control on who sees what. To find out more about Chi.mp please check it out here.

Anyway, so if you were wondering what are the benefits of being invited to Chi.mp, here are some of the benefits:

• gives you one free .mp domain
• serves as the place you can house and share your online content
• will keep and manage all your contacts from across the Web in one place, your “Ultimate Black Book”
• uses your domain name (enabled with OpenID) as your universal login across the Web
• will deliver on our owners’ Bill of Rights and the principles behind chi.mp

At the moment I have 5 invitations, which means it’s a first come first serve basis. If I get more invites I’ll post again.

To get your invites, please give me your name, email address and a reason .

This post was brought to you by Miami Interior Design Gallery

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Ran Out Of Ideas To Make Money Online?

Have you ran out of ideas to make money online? If you have, don’t worry as I recently was introduced to this list of 101 make money online ideas.

After just giving the list a cursory glance, I can say that just by reading this list you will get lots of ideas and inspiration on how to make money online. There are 101 money making ideas in that list, most of them requires minimal levels of skill and very little start up capital. Gone are the days where you could give the “But, I don’t know how to make money online” excuse.

One of them which impressed me the most was the 8th one in the list of 101:

8. If you’re smart AND a linguist you’d be doing that in multiple languages. And not paying for any domain till you’ve tried it free for five days to see if it does indeed get any type-in traffic (and how well that traffic converts). After you’ve tried it for five days and dropped it there’s nothing to stop you immediately picking it up again for another five day trial. Strange, but true. It’s not kiting, it’s legal.

I now understood how people could afford having so many domain names that only advertisements on them – they did not even buy the domain names. However, I don’t this money making idea is viable anymore as after checking wikipedia on Domain Tasting.

And now I want to contribute with my own make money online tip which isn’t in the list:

Sign up for forums and be a very active member, helping other members and generally contributing the community. Once you have a respectable amount of posts, you can then sell your signature space. This method require absolutely $0 start up capital

Don’t forget to check out the 101 make money online ideas guys.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!