I've had the same problem with one of my sites using the sitemap_blogs.php. I think the sitemap function is just hardwired to assign all posts the same priority of 0.9.

But now Google is cracking down on it, so hopefully the devs will improve this feature soon. My site just got knocked down from a Pagerank of 4 to a 3.

It took me a long time to get past the hump from 3 to 4, so it's pretty disappointing to have slipped backwards. Could have been caused by anything, of course, but sitemap warnings are a big red flag. I'm going back to manually generating them using xml-sitemaps.com until I find a permanent solution.

Cheers,
Scott

The 0.9 *is* hardcoded in /skins/sitemap/index.main.ohp.
If there is a defaultvalue for priority do change it there. I wouldn't have a clue how to calculate a value.

Good luck

I have experienced the same with Google pagerank, but Google explains that the priority is only an evaluation of the pages at the same site and not the rank in a search.
But its still a warning to get rid of

Google webmaster tools wrote:

<priority>

optional

The priority of this URL relative to other URLs on your site. Valid values range from 0.0 to 1.0. This value has no effect on your pages compared to pages on other sites, and only lets the search engines know which of your pages you deem most important so they can order the crawl of your pages in the way you would most like.

The default priority of a page is 0.5.

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. Since the priority is relative, it is only used to select between URLs on your site; the priority of your pages will not be compared to the priority of pages on other sites.

[url=https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/protocol.html]Google Webmaster Tools[/url]

I wouldn't worry to much. If you do: the priority is optional (so you can remove it, probably best to leave <priority></priority>) and its defaultvalue is 0.5 (so you can set it to it's defaultvalue)

Good luck

I use xml-sitemaps.com to generate my sitemap file and it has a setting which will automatically generate a different priority for each page. I had the same error in my webmaster tools, but by enabling this function - the error went away.

http://www.healthsciencenews.com

-Stephanie

Well, it would be a very good thing to have different priorities, but we need to think about a algorithm to this.

srblogger wrote:

I use xml-sitemaps.com to generate my sitemap file and it has a setting which will automatically generate a different priority for each page. I had the same error in my webmaster tools, but by enabling this function - the error went away.

http://www.healthsciencenews.com

-Stephanie

Stephanie-

Is this function located in sitemap_blogs.php, or is it something that has to be disabled in Google's webmaster tools. I'm not sure I understand.

Thanks,
Scott

Walter wrote:

Well, it would be a very good thing to have different priorities, but we need to think about a algorithm to this.

What would be ideal is a drop-down box or text box for each post on the backend where you can manually assign priority. Of course, to get more comprehensive, it would be nice to set up rules for each blog category that an algorithm would use to automatically assign priority as well. For instance, if one blog category is only for news commentary, then it might be helpful to create rules that degrade the priority of posts as they age, whereas other blog categories that don't have time-sensitive content may be better off with static priority numbers.

-Scott

Sitemaps is something you specify in Google's Webmaster Tools. I defined three sitemap files for each of my domains. It is a great tool for telling Google about your content and I am able to get new pages indexed within a few hours. Here is the link to Google's webmaster tools: http://www.google.com/webmasters/#utm_medium=et&utm_source=us-en-et-bizsol-0-finderB-all&utm_campaign=en

-Stephanie
http://www.trials.net
http://www.easydietcenter.com

Google isn't god :|

Summat I read on an seo's waffle ... I mean "blog" was that using sitemaps was a bad idea because it made it a lot harder to find orphan pages.

Personally, I have no idea if I have a sitemap, and google still manages to find my shit and waste my bandwidth within hours ..... mind you, it's not as bad as that msn live thng .... I really should kill that one at a server level and send it so a "sod off" page :D

¥

I disagree - Google *is* God.

Most search engines pull their data from Google and the majority of my traffic comes from Google.

-Stephanie

http://www.dataconnected.com
http://www.healthsciencenews.com

Let's do it with decreasing priority as time increases, so older posts get lower priority, newer posts get higher priority. Highest priority is 1, lowest is 0, but you don't want to tag as worthless any of your precious posts, so let's start at 0.5:

Apply this patch to skins/_sitemap/index.main.php:

diff -ub skins/_sitemap/index.main.php ~/tmp/b2evolution/blog/skins/_sitemap/index.main.php
--- skins/_sitemap/index.main.php       2008-08-06 15:22:43.000000000 +0200
+++ /home/lnieves/tmp/b2evolution/blog/skins/_sitemap/index.main.php    2007-11-03 23:04:30.000000000 +0100
@@ -45,7 +45,6 @@

 // Note: since URLs are likely to be clean ASCII, $io_charset can probably be faked to UTF-8 here

-$num_rows = $MainList->get_num_rows();
 header( 'Content-type: application/xml; charset=UTF-8' );

 echo '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?'.'>';
@@ -53,17 +52,15 @@

 <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
 <?php
-$count = 0;
 while( $Item = & mainlist_get_item() )
 {      // For each blog post, do everything below up to the closing curly brace "}"
        ?>
        <url>
                <loc><?php $Item->permanent_url( 'single' ) ?></loc>
                <lastmod><?php $Item->mod_date( 'isoZ', true ) ?></lastmod>
-    <priority><?php echo sprintf( "%.4f", 1 - 0.5*$count/$num_rows ) ?></priority>
+               <priority>0.9</priority>
        </url>
        <?php
-  $count++;
 } ?>
 </urlset>
 <?php

[url=http://liberal-venezolano.net/blog/sitemap.php?blog=5]This is the result[/url]

Perfect! Great patch! Thanks!

The new 2.4.5 has fixed this.

Walter wrote:

The new 2.4.5 has fixed this.

great B)

Hi, I would like to additionally have rankings based on Category

Something like this:

	if($Item->category == 'Announcments')
	{
		$prio = 0.9;
		$changefreq = 'monthly';

	}

Thanks!