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New Post 11/12/2008 6:43 AM
  Etienne Richard
8 posts
No Ranking


Best approach for setting page priorities? 

Hi Bruce,

We are using a site structure such as:

/Modules/<module information page>
/Support/Forum/<module support forum>

Unfortunately, the page that gets indexed in Google when we search for the module name is the page with all topics for the module in the support forums. We would like the page to show in Google to be the one under /Modules/. We are using your friendly url provider and basic SEO content optimization, but the support topics page contains more often the module name...

1) Could we accomplish this goal by setting a higher page priority for all pages under /Modules (otherwise, I guess we will need to disallow indexing through robots.txt)
2) What would be the best approach to implement this using your Google Site Map architecture?

Thank you,

Best,

Etienne
Adequation-DotNetNuke
 
New Post 11/12/2008 6:50 AM
  Etienne Richard
8 posts
No Ranking


Re: Best approach for setting page priorities? 
Modified By Etienne Richard on 11/12/2008 6:51:18 AM)

Forget about point #1, we have realized the forum pages are not even included in the sitemap, so it should be considered as a 0.5 priority whereas each module page is in the sitemap with a 0.8 priority.

Point #2 is still interesting. How could we setup a priority for all pages under a specific page using your architecture?

Thanks
 
New Post 11/17/2008 9:52 AM
  Bruce Chapman
1648 posts
1st Level Poster


Re: Best approach for setting page priorities? 

Hi Etienne

I think you misunderstand how the sitemap works.  The priority is given as a crawling priority to google - so it only affects the order in which pages are crawled, not the order in which they are displayed in the search results (for this will change depending on keyword matches anyway).  I've seen speculation that you can adjust your internal page rankings relative to each other, but I don't believe it to be true myself.

If you have a page coming up in the search results lower than another page, you will need to concentrate on the linking strategy for the lower page.  Check these things for the lower ranked page:

- ensure there are no duplicate Urls for the page (ie. default.aspx?tabid=xx and /tabid/xx/default.aspx)  Having the automatic 301 redirects switched on will help with this.

- do a search for all the links to the two pages in google, and work out how you can get more links to the lower page.  This may be internal linking within your site, or it may be external.

- Look at the title/description meta tags for the page and see if you can change anything to get it more relevant for your chosen search term.

-Bruce
 
New Post 11/19/2008 1:00 PM
  Etienne Richard
8 posts
No Ranking


Re: Best approach for setting page priorities? 

Hi Bruce,

I was talking about which page is shown of a particular website for a specific keyword in the search results, not about the order of that page in the search results. Page priority must have an importance for choosing which page to display in the search results between two pages of the same site. If two pages have the same importance for a particular keyword, for internal links, and all other factors, then page priority has to determine which page will show in the results. We'll never know how much importance is given to the page priority vs all other factors. I was wondering how you can see page priorities implemented in your architecture. Thanks

From Google:

Please note that the priority you assign to a page has no influence on the position of your URLs in a search engine's result pages. Search engines use this information when selecting between URLs on the same site, so you can use this tag to increase the likelihood that your more important pages are present in a search index.

Also, please note that assigning a high priority to all of the URLs on your site will not help you. Since the priority is relative, it is only used to select between URLs on your site; the priority of your pages will not be compared to the priority of pages on other sites.
 
New Post 11/20/2008 10:43 AM
  Bruce Chapman
1648 posts
1st Level Poster


Re: Best approach for setting page priorities? 

I think we've got a slight misunderstanding going : my point is that nothing you do with the sitemaps will influence the ranking of your pages in the search results, beyond making sure they're indexed properly.

 

Page priority must have an importance for choosing which page to display in the search results between two pages of the same site. If two pages have the same importance for a particular keyword, for internal links, and all other factors, then page priority has to determine which page will show in the results

Unfortunately, this isn' the case - as you pointed out from the Google advice:

 

Please note that the priority you assign to a page has no influence on the position of your URLs in a search engine's result pages. Search engines use this information when selecting between URLs on the same site, so you can use this tag to increase the likelihood that your more important pages are present in a search index.

From my understanding of the Google statement, the priority only affects the crawling priority of the site, not the display priority.  The reason Google says 'increase the likelihood that your more important pages are present in a search index' is that higher priority pages are crawled first, and thus, indexed first.  It doesn't affect the relative order of the pages - because the order of the pages is presumably affected by many things - not in the least of which are keywords, inbound links etc.  It wouldn't be possible to assign a higher ranking priority, because the search engine ranking is entirely dependent on which keywords match.

Anyway, that's my interpretation of the information - I'm happy to be proven wrong, but it's my belief that sitemaps are only used to determine which urls are crawled, and in what order.  It's the relevancy algorithms that will decide what order the search engine results are returned in.

The best way to ensure that one page is (generally) retuned higher in the search results than another is to ensure that any 'link juice' is passed to the page you want higher.  You can do this internally by using 'rel=nofollow' on any links to your less important page.  If you have significant external links coming in to your less important page, you could change the url of that page, and then 301 redirect those links to your more important page.  This would have the effect of increasing the incoming links to your more important page, and it will rank higher than the less important page over time.
 
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