Sitemap.XML – Why Changefreq & Priority Are Important
If your website has an XML sitemap, Changefreq and Priority are two important tags for supplying data to the search engines. They affect when and how often search engine “spiders” (also called “robots” or “crawlers”) visit your site’s individual pages, which has various implications. Although using the Changefreq and Priority XML sitemap tags is voluntary, they remain important for several reasons…
According to Google.com, the Changefreq XML tag may be set to one of seven frequencies: “never”, “yearly”, “monthly”, “weekly”, “daily”, “hourly”, or “always”. This tells the search engines approximately how often each page is updated. An update refers to actual changes to the HTML code or text of the page, not updated Flash content or modified images. Changefreq examples…
NEVER: Old news stories, press releases, etc.
YEARLY: Contact, “About Us”, login, registration pages.
MONTHLY: FAQs, instructions, occasionally updated articles.
WEEKLY: Product info pages, website directories.
DAILY: Blog entry index, classifieds, small message board.
HOURLY: Major news site, weather information, forum.
ALWAYS: Stock market data, social bookmarking categories.
The Priority XML sitemap tag is useful, although not quite as important. It is set to a number ranging from zero to one; if no number is assigned, a page’s priority is 0.5. A high priority page may be indexed more often and/or appear above other pages from the same site in search results. Here are some examples of different types of pages and how their Priority sitemap XML tag value might be set, depending upon how important they are…
0.8-1.0: Homepage, subdomains, product info, major features.
0.4-0.7: Articles and blog entries, category pages, FAQs.
0.0-0.3: Outdated news, info that has become irrelevant.
How strictly they want to follow the Priority and Changefreq sitemap specifications is up to the search engines; these XML tags are considered preferences, not orders. This doesn’t mean search engines don’t consider Priority and Changefreq important, just that they won’t put sitemap instructions before their own interests (like making sure a site hasn’t changed its subject or become pornographic).
But why is it important when or how frequently search engine “spiders” index your pages? When a “spider” visits a web page, it records information about the page’s content, title, META tags, links, and other characteristics. This ensures that search results reflect its latest content and take into account any recent improvements (such as new META tags or repaired links).
However, it is unnecessary for “spiders” to regularly scan pages that are seldom or never updated. Spider indexing consumes bandwidth (which can increase the cost of operating your website), and may briefly slow access to your site if it is run on a low-capacity server. Thus it is important to set the Changefreq sitemap tag to accurately reflect how often individual pages are updated.
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Robots & Crawlers | seowhitehats | March 15, 2009
I follow your posts for quite a long time and must tell you that your articles are always valuable to readers.
p.s. Year One is already on the Internet and you can watch it for free.
I always put my articles above 0.5 priority. however I never put changefreq. Thank for sharing that info. I hope my site will get index faster.
I have a page with just links to the newest 20 articles which I out on a priority of 1 so my new articles index faster.
Hello all,
I have a website of php.It has only one index page and all page is being control by database from URL value.So every category is displaying in same page with respect to URL value.So i have only single page.I want to make my site map.How will i dislay my site map. My site is being control by URL..
if cat=1 then category_1 is displaying(data is coming from database)
*
*
if cat=n then category_n is diaplyig (data is coming from database)
so on…
Plz sugest me how the site map should be there in xml.
Thank you.
I always put my articles above 0.5 priority. however I never put changefreq. Thank for sharing that info. I hope my site will get index faster.
I think this is good info foe anybody who is new in development
0.8-1.0: Homepage,subHomepage
0.4-0.7: about-us,contact-us like pages
0.0-0.3: Outdated news, info that has become irrelevant.
i have website with high pagerank but google is slowly indexed my web. What should i do?
may i put my homepage of website in sitemap and give changefreq with 1.0?
Thanx – e-xplore.blogspot.com
What if you set the changefreq=daily but in fact the page doesn’t really change daily but perhaps weekly or even monthly. If Google finds that your ‘daily’ request is not accurate, does it then not crawl these pages on a daily? Is there some sort of penelty? I find that out of 9000 submitted pages, 6000 are indexed yet on average only 700 are crawled. Of course I have new pages added every day but only a few get indexed right away? Any tips on that front?
I usually create 2 sitemaps for my sites. One xml for Google and one html for users.