Sitemap Attributes

For every file in your sitemap, there are four pieces of information you can supply Google about the file. The URL location is required; all the others are optional.

URL Location

This is the URL of the file. Rapid Sitemaps represents paths in the same manner as Windows Explorer with a folder structure on the left and the files in the selected folder on the right. Folder and file names are displayed as you would read them, but will be included in the sitemap as url-encoded (see Technical/Url Encoding).

Rapid Sitemaps assumes that files with the same filename, but different query strings (the part after the ?) are different files, but files that differ only in the fragment (the part after the #) are the same.

For example:

http://www.mysite.com/myfile.htm is different from
http://www.mysite.com/myfile.htm?id=1, but the same as
http://www.mysite.com/myfile.htm#top

Priority

Google allows you to tell them which files are more or less important on your site. This is done by assigning a priority to each file. The priority is a number between 0 and 1, with the default being 0.5.

All new or imported files will be assigned a priority of 0.5. This attribute will be ignored when the sitemap is saved, if the value is 0.5 (since this is the default).

Note: Priority has no effect on your rankings in the Google Search Engine; it is only an indication of the relative importance of the pages within your site. In other words, Google will only consider this when deciding which of your pages to add to the search results, not where to place them in the results.

Last Updated Date

This value tells Google when the file was last updated, so that if Google has already indexed the page, it does not need to do it again. Rapid Sitemaps gets this value from the files that it imports, but dynamic content doesnt return a last-updated date, so you will have to enter these dates manually.

This value is optional. If is not included, Google will consider the value of the Change Frequency attribute if it exists, and use whatever method was used previously to determine whether or not to fetch a page.

Change Frequency

This value is used to indicate to Google how often the file is updated. It can have one of the following values:

always	Indicates that the page is changed every time it is accessed. This value should only be used for dynamic content pages.
hourly	Indicates that the page is updated every hour
daily	Indicates that the page is updated at least every day
weekly	Indicates that the page is updated at least every week
monthly	Indicates that the page is updated at least every month
yearly	Indicates that the page is updated at least every year
never	Indicates that the page is never updated. Used for archived pages.
none	This value tells Rapid Sitemaps not to include a Change Frequency attribute for this file. This is the default.

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