XML Sitemap
XML Sitemap Overview
Allow search engines to read a list containing every page on your site. This feature automatically creates an XML sitemap and robots.txt entries that adhere to the sitemaps.org protocol. It also includes the ability to adjust the Priority and Change Frequency values for each type of page that your website contains.
XML Sitemap Properties
Generate SiteMaps.org xml files: This setting determines whether or not your XML Sitemap will be created. If set to YES, the XML Sitemap will be created during the generation of your website.
Create robots.txt Custom Page: This setting should be adjusted by SEO experts only. The robots.txt file is read by search engines and is used here to indicate the location of the xml sitemap.
Priority as Defined by Sitemaps.org: The priority of this URL relative to other URLs on your site. Valid values range from 0.0 to 1.0. This value does not affect how your pages are compared to pages on other sites; it only lets the search engines know which pages you deem most important for the crawlers. The default priority of a page is 0.5. Please note that the priority you assign to a page is not likely to influence the position of your URLs in a search engine’s result pages. Search engines may use this information when selecting between URLs on the same site, so you can use this tag to increase the likelihood that your most important pages are present in a search index. Also, please note that assigning a high priority to all of the URLs on your site is not likely to help you. Since the priority is relative, it is only used to select between URLs on your site.
Change Frequency as defined by Sitemaps.org: How frequently the page is likely to change. This value provides general information to search engines and may not correlate exactly to how often they crawl the page. Valid values are: always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, never. The value Always should be used to describe documents that change each time they are accessed. The value Never should be used to describe archived URLs. Please note that the value of this tag is considered a hint and not a command. Even though search engine crawlers may consider this information when making decisions, they may crawl pages marked Hourly less frequently than that, and they may crawl pages marked Yearly more frequently than that. Crawlers may periodically crawl pages marked Never so that they can handle unexpected changes to those pages.