How important is the optional <priority>tag in an XML sitemap of your website? Can this help search engines understand the hierarchy of a website?</priority>

[mycity4kids]

Can the <priority>tag be used to tell search engines the hierarchy of a site or should it be used to let search engines know which priority to we want pages to be indexed in?</priority>

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi,

If you would deem all internal pages to be of equal importance, then yes, there is no harm in this. The homepage is always set at 1.0 though.

That said, everyone always has a view of their internal pages and which they class as pass-though to get to something more important, so do keep this in mind when deciding.

-Andy

[mycity4kids]

Hi Andy,

Thanks for the response. We are a local listings site and have a number of category/sub-category/business-detail pages (possibly at a city as well as a location level) in the structure of our site. This being the case, what would you suggest the priority to be allocated to the different pages should be? If just an indication to the bots to specify all the important pages on the site to crawl, then should we just maintain the same priority (say 0.8) for all the hierarchies (possibly with the home page as 1.0)?

[Andy.Drinkwater]

It's a suggestion, and just indicates to Googlebot how often they should come along. It won't do anything in terms of telling them more about the site hierarchy really, but will give them an idea about which pages are most important.

That said, you should try and follow the following structure:

Homepage: 100%
Internal Pages: 60%
Blog Pages: 30%

Or something very similar.

I hope this helps.

-Andy