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.

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How The Google Cache Feature Saved Me A Lot Of Effort And Time

We all know how far reaching Google, we constantly use many of their services such as Gmail, Adsense, Adwords, Google Earth, Google Search and their just released Google Chrome web browser. What we don’t know is that Google offers so much more than just that, services that are really minor and often overlooked by many people. One such service or more accurately called as a feature of Google Search is it’s cache feature.

The cache feature displays a cached version of a website. Now, this feature alone can be useful in so many ways such as seeing how much a website has changed over a short period of time, loading webpages which are slow to load or are down and reading something the owner has just removed recently.

The Google Cache feature just saved me a lot of time and effort recently. I had deleted one of my posts which had taken quite an amount of time to write and I had no backups of it. I was quite devastated when it occurred to me that I shouldn’t have deleted it and now I had no way or time to rewrite it again.

Well, if it weren’t for me being a little enterprising and the usefulness of the Google Cache, that might have been the end of the story, a bad ending mind you. However, luckily I was quite creative and suddenly remembered about the Google Cache feature of Google Search. I typed in the URL of the post and was hoping that Google had managed to index the page (it was quite new) before I had deleted it. I needn’t have worried though, the posts had been indexed by Google and after just clicking the cached link and copying and pasting the content right back on my blog I had sorted out the dilemma I was previously in .

Learning point: Next time when you are in a fix, try to think creatively about how to solve the problem. And if you are blogger, now you know how to use Google Cache as a last resort to get back the content of your post .

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Google Chrome – The New Internet Browser On The Block Is Ready To Be Downloaded

Google Chrome, the new internet browser from Google which is in it’s beta is now ready to be downloaded by the general public. Google Chrome is currently only available to Windows, so sorry to those of you who are running MacOsX or Linux as you’ll have to wait to sometime in the future before being able to try out Google Chrome

Google Chrome is an open source browser which combines many of the top features of the few popular internet browsers such as Firefox 3, Safari and Opera whilst streamlining and simplifying the interface.

Some of Google Chromes more touted features are:

• Increase in speed as Google Chrome is based on Webkit which powers Safari, however it has added a more powerful Javascript engine called V8 which substantially increases it’s speed.
• Simple and intuitive interface which leaves more room for the actual internet, balancing the need of features and too many features.
• Increased security by the sand-box fashion in which Google Chrome was built which sand-boxes things that go through the browser, thus protecting the computer.
• Better under-the-hood design which protects other Google Chrome tabs from closing even though one of its tab has crashed, a syndrome called “Sad Tab”.

I downloaded Google Chrome when as soon as I knew it had been released and I must say that I’m quite happy with it’s performance. I can definitely feel it’s faster than Firefox 3 which is the fastest browser I have ever used before Google Chrome. I won’t be abandoning Firefox 3 anytime soon though as I rely on too many plugins on it such as Roboform. The other reason why I can’t make Google Chrome my default browser is because it is not suited for usage with many tabs open as you can’t scroll through the tabs, rather, the tabs become smaller. I usually have from anywhere between 30 to 100 plus tabs open on Firefox 3, but this is not possible on Google Chrome.

The release of Google Chrome is certainly good news for everyone, as end-users get a wider choice and web designers like myself can hope that more people will see how incompetent and switch to another browser. Even now, I have totally stopped trying to “fix” my site on Internet Explorer as it needs so many kinds of hacks to make it display my blog properly that I feel it is no longer worth it .

Anyway, click here to Download Google Chrome, or here to check out the Google Chrome comic which explains it’s new features.

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Make Money Online From Your Website With Backlinks.com – A Text Link Broker

One of the easiest way to make money online from their website is selling text links. Text links are usually bought by other people who are willing to pay to help boost the PageRank their site. Although selling text links is easy as it does not require much work on your part to display the text link, it requires a lot of work to find people who want to buy text links. Backlinks.com is a text link broker which acts as a middleman who sells text links for you but who also takes a cut of your earnings.

Backlinks.com will allow you to generate additional income on top of all your other revenue streams (Google Adsense, Kontera etc) without doing any work. All you need to do is just add a special code given to you in your template and whenever anyone buys text links on your site from Backlinks.com it will automatically appear on your site. Backlinks.com only allows you to sell text links on web pages that have a minimum PageRank of 1, so these links are not site-wide but just limited to the page which it was bought from.

For the service they provide, Backlinks.com takes away 50% of the earnings, which means that if you earn $50.00 from it, you’ll only recieve $25.00 (yes, I know it’s a high percentage). Backlinks.com sends out payment through PayPal on the 1st of every month.

These are the rates for web pages depending on PageRank:

You will be paid the following monthly rates for text links. Rates are paid per month per text link.

PageRank (PR) 1 homepage $.50 , subpage $.50
PageRank (PR) 2 homepage $1 , subpage $1
PageRank (PR) 3 homepage $2 , subpage $1.50
PageRank (PR) 4 homepage $3 , subpage $2
PageRank (PR) 5 homepage $4.50 , subpage $3.50
PageRank (PR) 6 homepage $12.50 , subpage $10
PageRank (PR) 7 homepage $30 , subpage $25
PageRank (PR) 8 homepage $75 , subpage $50

So far within this week, I have sold 3 text links on my PR 2 homepage, giving me a $3 into my account. Yes, I know this isn’t much and the links are of low quality (you can control to a certain extent what kinds of links that are allowed to be shown) but still this is money coming in without me doing anything.

Sign up now! (It’s my affiliate link, I would be really grateful if you used it )

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Google Knol The Wikipedia Alternative?

Google recently launched the public beta of Google Knol on the 23rd of July.

Knol is similar and yet different to Wikipedia in some ways. Firstly, Wikipedia users can create and edit any article they like (although there are some restrictions to seniority) but Knol is has articles created by authors who can choose whether to let other users or specific authors to edit their articles.

What makes Google Knol so interesting is that it allows you to place Google Adsense advertisements on your Knol’s, which means if you have a very popular Knol, you can earn a decent bit of income from it. As I had experimented a few days ago, Knol’s are indexed by the Google search engine, which means that your Knol has the potential to rank very high in the search engines results (just like Wikipedia) and if you have implemented your Google Adsense code into the Knol, you might earn a decent amount of cash. Who would have guess Google Knol becoming into a money making opportunity whilst building up reputation of the author at the same time.

Anyway, after learning about this I was kind of sad as I had gotten banned from Google a few years ago and as Google Knol currently does not accept other kinds of advertisement code on it, I guess I’ll just have to pass up this unique opportunity.

I’m still experimenting with Google Knol and seeing how it works and what other functions it can play, but for now it looks quite promising. And as Google Knol is still relatively young, we’ll give it sometime and who knows, maybe it might become the next big thing since Youtube

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