TABLE 16-2 (continued)
Tag When Used Description<priority> The default priority of a page is 0.5.
(continued) 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. Because the priority is relative, it is
used only to select between URLs on your site; the priority of your
pages will not be compared to the priority of pages on other sites.If you’re using all of these tags in Table 16-2 in your XML site map, it might look something like
the following site map. This sitemap includes only a few URLs, each with a different set of optional
parameters. Also notice that the escape characters are used in the URLs, too.<?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”UTF-8”?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9”><url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/catalog?item=12&desc=vacation_
hawaii</loc>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/catalog?item=73&desc=vacation_
new_zealand</loc>
<lastmod>2004-12-23</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/catalog?item=74&desc=vacation_
newfoundland</loc>
<lastmod>2004-12-23T18:00:15+00:00</lastmod>
<priority>0.3</priority>
</url>236
Part III Optimizing Search Strategies
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