Sitemap Generator Forum

Hi

The hierarchical structure of my site is coming out very messy. I'm not surprised, to be honest.

Most of the site is held on one level - but we have around 20,000 urls in the sitemap.

Can I manage this by setting the priorities?

So, there is the single 'Priority' field. If I am to assign priority do I leave that blank?

Could I then set the highest priority to home, then to other 'main' navigation pages, and then to some select pages based on partial URLs that have fixed elements (e.g. article/)?

Thanks
Rob

Hello,

yes, you can use auto-prioriry setting, with main priority set to 1.0 (it will be assigned to y our homepage)

Thanks - but that's how I started and got a very messy structure.

This is because we have a lot of dynamically created content that is not all held in subfolders.

It also wouldn't be clear to the crawler what pages are main navigation pages as these - and other files - are held on one level.

I have also just read advice not to use any 3rd party tool on large dynamic sites...

Thanks

Rob

I have a similar issue with my unlimited site map.  I left the default priority level to 1.0 and had it automatically change with depth level.  Now my Google Custom search is showing second and third pages of a story before the primary page (site is [ External links are visible to forum administrators only ].  Example would be to search Wyatt Earp in our custom search on the upper left border.  It shows several pages (we-wyattearp5.html, 3 ect) on the first page of results, but the primary page (we-wyattearp.html) isn't listed for several search pages.). 

If I leave priority level blank, will it remove that data from the xml?

Hello,

the priority field in sitemap doesn't affect the search results, it's just a "hint" for se bots which pages to crawl first.

Interesting, since the search problem didn't begin until implementing the site map could it be something else in the xml it self? 

Nope, xml sitemap doesn't tell how to serve *search results*, that's just an instruction how to *crawl* your site better.