Do Not Neglect Priority Parameter of Sitemap

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Website sitemap is one of best site navigation page it not only helps website readers to get their page of interest but also helps search engine to identify all the pages of website which be hidden or didn’t got crawled properly.

Google Webmaster Guide lines also suggests to add sitemap to Google Webmaster so that google can get crawl and index page of website.

Still many webmaster doesn’t know the importance of Sitemap. We blogger tend to give less importance to sitemap. Generally Bloggers use Google Sitemap Plugin to generate sitemap for blog.

But some of the important parameter of sitemap like Page Change Frequency, WebPages Priority, Last Modification Time etc, rarely know to us. It happen that I had set the priority of all pages to highest i.e Priority 1 (Range 0 to 1) thinking keeping all blog post to highest priority will help my post to get crawl faster.

As I regularly keep watch on Google Webmaster, I got The warning about this priority stuff.

From above screenshot you must have got how much importance Google gives to Priority attribute of sitemap. I have to rectify that problem as soon as possible, after Googling around I got some of default values which we need to set and here are those values.

For Default Values of Sitemap Priority of Webpage

1) Home Page Set to 1

2) Every Post Set to 0.5

3) Archive and Category Pages 0.3

4) Single Pages Set to 0.1

If are still not aware of Sitemap then I would recommend to have look on Official Google Webmaster Guidelines.