Hi,

Q1 - Is Sitemap Order Important

Does the order of the sitemap effect how Google uses the sitemap.

I was just wondering if it started at the top and worked its way down?

If so I would like to have be able to reorder the URLs

Q2 - Can I cut and paste my reordered sitemap back into Sitemap Generator and have it saved?

I have reordered the the sitemap in excel and then pasted the sitemap back into the website but when I upload the sitemap the previous URL order remains.

Is there a way of avoiding this?

PS - I did find a work around which was to resave the new sitemap to XML sitemap output path and then do the upload. Its just an extra step that would be nice to avoid.

Thanks,

Will

Order does not matter. Use the priority tag (derived from the importance score in A1SG) instead to give Google a hins on which URLs to process first:

http://www.microsystools.com/products/sitemap-generator/help/xml-sitemap-priority-tag/
http://www.microsystools.com/products/sitemap-generator/help/xml-sitemaps-creator-importance/


If you really want to control order, you can also use option:
Create sitemap | Document options |Sort URLs in sitemap after "importance"

Thanks

Quote from: Webhelpforums on May 24, 2013, 10:01:12 AM
Order does not matter. Use the priority tag (derived from the importance score in A1SG) instead to give Google a hint on which URLs to process first
...
If you really want to control order, you can also use option:
Create sitemap | Document options |Sort URLs in sitemap after "importance"

O.K. but I think, the Google bot indexes not all found files immediately. It only indexes the files gradually. And for that an order could be important, no?

Or depends the changing number of indexed files in the Google WMT on the changefreq-tag
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq><priority>0.2</priority>

in the xml-file? I suppose the priority-tag in the xml-file bases on the importance score of A1SG?

I especially want that Google indexes the newest files immediately. Therefore I create and ping new sitemaps.
Can I tell this to G. somehow with a sitemap? Or "breaks" a new sitemap the "calendar" of G. and the robot indexes completely new after a new ping?

Finally - how can I fix the wanted priority / importance score to certain files?
I don't like to change this manually every time A1SG creates a new set of sitemaps.

I do not believe order of URLs in XML sitemaps are important. (At all!) I believe Google reads the entire XML file in one go and then adds he URLs to various queues depending on Google-scoring, XML priority values and XML change frequency values.

That said, for those who believe otherwise, you can now have URLs listed in "importance" order in generated XML sitemaps.

...

You can "change and lock" importance values (for which XML priority values are based on in A1 Sitemap Generator) across multiple scans. See:

http://www.microsystools.com/products/sitemap-generator/help/xml-sitemaps-creator-importance/

Then use the "recrawl" feature in A1 Sitemap Generator:
http://www.microsystools.com/products/sitemap-generator/help/sitemap-generator-resume-scan/