Sitemap Warning Message from Google Webmaster and robot.txt not found (404).

I recieved a warning message from google webmaster which is stated below:

All the URLs in your Sitemap have the same priority.
All the URLs in your Sitemap are set to the same priority (not the default priority). Priority indicates the importance of a particular URL relative to other URLs on your site, and doesn't impact your site's performance in search results. If all URLs have the same priority, Google can't tell which are more important. Problem detected on: Oct 30, 2008

I have investigated a little bit about this issue and the problem is that when synthasite makes the sitemap.xml, all priorities are set 1.0 for all the pages in the website. Priorities have to be different so that google can indicate the importance of each page in the website. Please let me know how can we fix this issue.

Another issue that I ́m facing is with the robots.txt URL. I recieve a message from google that the page was not found (404). This is because google goes after the url: http://mysite.synthasite.com/robots.txt and here in synthasite we cannot make this url or file. Please help.

Thanks,

Paul

paulbakk

4 Posts
0 Reply Likes
anxious

Posted 11 years ago

11 years ago

Chris

82 Posts
2 Reply Likes

Official Response

Hi Paul - I noticed your question and thought I'd jump in to add a bit of additional information here.

When we create your sitemap each time you publish, the page priority is set based on where it is in your site hierarchy. All of the pages linked in your main menu are set with a default priority, and any "subpages" which aren't included in the main navigation are given a slightly lower priority. For more information on creating subpages, please see our tutorial at http://www.synthasite.com/tutorials/c... .

The page priorities are meant to give search engines like Google a nudge in the right direction, but are only a small portion of how they see your pages. It's common practice to only assign one or two priorities in a sitemap, which is why we've set up the process as I described above and not included a way to modify it. I'll explore the ability to change this in the future.

We're also working on the ability for users such as yourself to create a robots.txt file, but don't have that ability at this time. I apologize for the warning you're seeing in Google, but please rest assured that it's just a notification and won't cause any sort of penalty for your site.

In general, the metrics I suggest looking at in Google's Webmaster Tools interface are the crawl statistics to see how long it's been since Google's crawled your pages and how many pages it's found.

I hope this helps explain things a bit further. Keep the questions and feedback coming - we use questions like this to help prioritize the features we add!

Best,
Chris