What Is Crawl Priority in SEO?
Use Cases
Used in large sites to signal to search engines which URLs should be crawled more frequently, ensuring important pages are indexed quickly.
Crawl priority helps ensure fresh blog posts or product pages are discovered faster for competitive time-sensitive queries.
Helps SEOs manage crawl frequency in conjunction with XML sitemaps and robots.txt for better site health and discoverability.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Does Google use crawl priority from sitemaps?
Google has stated it may ignore the priority tag in sitemaps, but consistent signals can still guide crawlers indirectly.
Can I control crawl rates directly?
Not entirely, but you can influence crawl behavior using Google Search Console, robots.txt, and effective crawl priority settings.
Is crawl priority useful for small websites?
It’s more impactful for large sites, but even small sites can benefit from defining clear priority for core pages.
How often should I update crawl priority?
Not directly. It influences indexing frequency, which can impact how quickly content appears in search results.
Does crawl priority affect ranking?
Crawl priority suggests importance to crawlers, while crawl frequency is how often a page actually gets crawled.
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