: Priority of tags vs posts in a sitemap.xml file I have a content based website and I'm in the process of creating a sitemap.xml file. I was wondering if it would be best to give high priority

@Odierno851

Google generally uses the "priority" values in Sitemap files as hints for crawling and indexing, not for ranking. In general, Google recommends the following for "priority":


Don't use simple automated metrics (eg "PageRank" or similar) to determine the "priority" value. Especially if it's something which Google can determine on their own, it makes little sense to reuse that for "priority".
If you can't specify a value, don't use a default placeholder like 0.5 or 1.0 (it's optional, so you can just not include it in the Sitemap file)


Personally, I would not spend too much time worrying about what kind of values you can use there. If you're not sure, I would just submit the Sitemap files without "priority".

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@Kevin317

FYI, priority is merely a suggestion and does not mean that those pages will be crawled any faster or given any priority when ranking pages. It definitely will not improve their rankings. Remember, pages are ranked on their relevance for any given search term, not whether you say they are important or not.

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@Yeniel560

I'm assuming that by "tag URLs" you mean a kind of category page, like a tag page on Pro Webmasters. And by "post URLs" you mean blog posts etc, like a question page on Pro Webmasters.

In which case, it's the posts every time. The posts have more content, are more unique, and generally "static" (the content doesn't change rapidly). Whereas tag pages are just lists of other content, contain very little unique themselves, and change rapidly as you add more posts.

Look at the types of content search engines return for your queries. It's almost always a static-ish content page, not categories or generic pages like that. I always give priority "1.0" to all post/content pages then scale down for other pages.

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