Website Sitemaps and <priority>, is it working?

Question

Hi,

My "Privacy Policy" page is seen more important by Google than other really more important pages on my website.

I'm currently creating a script to generate a sitemap, should I bother with the priority?

How do you effectively assign priorities to pages? I consider one of my page important but the page have less content than another one less important to my eyes... but maybe Google bot will see it the other way around.

If my degree of "importantness" differs from the one of Google, will I get penalized on the ranking for a particular page?

Thank you for sharing your black art with us :P

Answer 1

The priority setting is different than what you're thinking. The priority setting is what priority you put to that page for crawling frequency. It doesn't mean you care about that page more than others or anything like that, but how often do you want it crawled?

Google doesn't follow it 100%, but it's pretty good about it, and I would say your privacy policy should be the lowest priority, what you should ask: How often does this page change? For a typical site, it's something like this:

/index.htm  - [10] - New articles posted all the time, crawl it often
/programming - [8] - This is my programming section, doesn't change as much 
/photos - [5] - I update this about 3 times a year. 
/About Us - [1] - This page rarely changes, no need to crawl it a lot. 
/Privacy Policy - [1] - This page rarely changes, no need to crawl it a lot.  

And remember, don't try to game the system. A setting of "10" for all pages just means you're cancelling it all out. And the Google algorithm is an extremely complex method that weeds out people trying to cheat, and I guarantee you priority abuse is addressed somewhere in their engine.

Hope this answers your question, and good luck!