Build A Niche Store Google Sitemap Errors

If you are using Google webmasters tools (and you should be), you may have noticed getting some errors with your sitemaps the last few days. Build A Niche Store creates it's own sitemap on the fly. You can see your own sitemap at http://yoursitename.com/sitemap.xml if you set up your store in the root folder. What Google seems to be throwing errors on is the fact that the auto generated sitemap gives a priority of 1 to every page. Google does not seem to like this now. Below is a little more on priority from 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.

You can edit the priority to each and every page to default by opening the sitemap.php file you have on your harddrive from the latest BANS download and browse down to the bottom until you find:

function sitemap($cat_url, $update) {
echo '<url>';
echo '<loc>'.URL_PATH.'/'.$cat_url.'</loc>';
echo '<changefreq>'.$update.'</changefreq>';
echo '<priority>1</priority>';
echo '</url>';

You can then change the number 1 in the priority section to 0.5 it will then look like below.

function sitemap($cat_url, $update) {
echo '<url>';
echo '<loc>'.URL_PATH.'/'.$cat_url.'</loc>';
echo '<changefreq>'.$update.'</changefreq>';
echo '<priority>0.5</priority>';
echo '</url>';

Sonjay and Bob also have fixes in this thread for those that want to designate different priority numbers to certain pages. I am currently split testing these.

Overall both these fixes are probably not of HUGE importance, but any time Google flashes red letters at me, I try to sort them out. Perhaps in future BANS releases there will be an option to easily set the priority of each page and have it show in the sitemap.

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