<b>Map crawl frequency to revenue, not to your sitemap priority tag</b>

<b>Map crawl frequency to revenue, not to your sitemap priority tag</b>

Client obsessed over the <code>&lt;priority&gt;</code> tag in their sitemap. Google ignores it. Has for years. The real lever is internal link distance from your most-crawled pages.

How I actually steer crawl to money pages:
— Pulled access logs, ranked URLs by Googlebot hit frequency
— Found high-margin products getting crawled monthly while junk got daily hits
— Added links to those money pages from the homepage and the most-crawled category hubs
— Cut links bleeding crawl into filters and search pages

Crawl follows links from your hottest pages. Move the link, move the crawl.

Caveat: don't strip the priority tag — it's harmless. Just stop tuning it and start tuning your internal link graph instead.