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When you assign a priority to URLs with Google sitemap, do you give the higher priority to your actual content pages (articles, etc) or to your sitemaps / navigation pages, which contain links to all of the articles?

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by BamaStangGuy

Dani AI

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Short answer: treat the sitemap <priority> value as an editorial hint, not a control. The sitemap protocol itself describes priority as a relative signal for crawlers, and search engines decide how to use it (Sitemaps protocol, Google Search Central — sitemaps). For practical SEO you should use the sitemap to surface canonical, indexable pages and rely on internal linking, canonicals, and page quality to influence what gets crawled and ranked.

A pragmatic way to use priorities on a forum:

  • Keep values consistent and meaningful (home/section pages higher than low-value, paginated or duplicate pages).
  • Exclude thin or utility pages from the sitemap rather than inflating their priority.
  • Use lastmod for freshness and generate sitemaps dynamically for active sites.
    Example XML URL entry:
    <url>
<loc>https://example.com/thread/123</loc>
<lastmod>2025-11-29</lastmod>
<priority>0.7</priority>
</url>

If changing sitemap priorities coincides with a traffic drop (as raised by ), run this focused checklist before assuming priority values caused it:

  1. Inspect affected pages in Google Search Console: Performance (queries/pages), Coverage, and Manual Actions.
  2. Use URL Inspection to confirm the indexed URL, rendered HTML, and the canonical Google chose.
  3. Check for accidental robots.txt disallows, noindex meta tags, or canonical changes.
  4. Review server logs for increased 4xx/5xx responses or crawl anomalies and verify page speed.
  5. Ensure sitemaps only list canonical URLs and that sitemap submission in Search Console shows no errors.
  6. Review recent site/template changes, redirects, analytics filters, or major external events (link loss or algorithm updates).

Tie sitemap priority to a broader indexing strategy rather than treating it as the lever that controls Google referrals. For forums, prioritize canonical threads and prune low-value pages from the sitemap to make crawl budget use more efficient.

Recommended Answers

All 7 Replies

Member Avatar for Harry smith

IMO you should give higher priority to your content pages, they are important for Google and about sitemap page; it is going to be crawled by Google.

Member Avatar for stymiee

Tough call. The content pages are the "bread and butter" but the portal type pages are more likely to rank well naturally. I never really gave it much thought because Google does not seem to give any weight to that field (at least not yet anyway).

Member Avatar for BamaStangGuy

I would give it to the content pages to make sure they get looked at first. I agree with stymiee though that they don't give much weight to it.

Member Avatar for Dani

Almost two months ago, I submitted a Google sitemap where I gave the forum display pages more weight than the thread pages. I was hoping that this would get Google to get more people coming into those index pages instead of individual threads, and perhaps then they'd spend more time on the site before moving on. The result, however, was that my traffic from Google decreased by 50% and I'm trying to figure out whether it is because of the sitemap or not. I've redone my sitemap last week giving the threads (the content pages, which Google probably thrives on more) a higher priority, so we'll see if it changes things.

Member Avatar for BamaStangGuy

I'd be interested in seeing if this improves your search engine referrals.

Member Avatar for Dani

I'd be interested in seeing if this improves your search engine referrals.

I bet I'm more interested (and more desperate) than you are! :) Will keep you updated.

Member Avatar for BamaStangGuy

I bet I'm more interested (and more desperate) than you are! :) Will keep you updated.

I would hope so :D

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