Google Warnings

[Silentcarrot]

Hey,

I have followed the advice about creating an XML sitemap and had it created at xml-sitemaps.com. I submitted the sitemap to google yesterday, and checked the status of it and it said "warnings". Here was what the warning was.

All the URLs in your Sitemap have the same priority.
All the URLs in your Sitemap are set to the same priority (not the default priority). Priority indicates the importance of a particular URL relative to other URLs on your site, and doesn't impact your site's performance in search results. If all URLs have the same priority, Google can't tell which are more important.

Was wondering what I need to do to fix it? My site is new so take it with a grain of salt, thanks!

~silentcarrot~

www.beginnersstud.com

[kaus]

You have them all set to the same priority so when you used the automated sitemap generator there is an option there listing priority...you have it marked as one...unless you changed it yourself after.

Either way your homepage should be listed as 1.0, but when you list the other pages as 1.0 as well you run into problems because your telling google that all of your pages have the same level of importance...which they dont. Go back in and change it. The numbers are to be in decimal value from 0.1 to 1.0...main pages should be higher than your filler pages.

Once that is done resubmit it

Example minus the hyphens the code was being a pain in the ass and wouldnt show without them


<-url->
<-loc.>http://www.myhomepage.com/<-/loc.>

<-priority->1.0<-/priority->
<-lastmod->2008-08-16T04:26:07+00:00<-/lastmod->
<-changefreq->daily<-/changefreq->
<-/url->

−
<-url->
<-loc->http://www.myhomepage.com/innerpage/<-/loc->

<-priority>0.5<-/priority->
<-lastmod->2008-08-08T04:12:28+00:00<-/lastmod->
<-changefreq->daily<-/changefreq->

[Silentcarrot]

Ok, I see, when i looked back at the sitemap, I see that the homepage was indeed 1.0, and the other pages were all 8.0? I made it so some pages, like the 'how to' pages were like 8.0, and the reviews to be 7.0 and so on. That alright?


~silentcarrot~

[mupha]

Priority should be a value between 0.0 and 1.0 only - so 8.0, 5.0 etc are not valid, which might be what was generating your warning.

From Google (https://www.google.com/webmasters/to...rotocol.html):

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.

[Silentcarrot]

Alright, everything is back to normal, thanks guys!