Site Hierarchy Messy

[robertsrobson]

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

[XML-Sitemaps Support]

Hello,

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

[robertsrobson]

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

[orders92]

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 http://www.legendsofamerica.com.  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?

[XML-Sitemaps Support]

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.

[orders92]

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

[XML-Sitemaps Support]

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