Has important is it to set "priority" and "frequency" in sitemaps?

[nicole.healthline]

Has anyone ever done any testing on setting "priority' and "frequency" in their sitemaps? What was the result? Does specifying priority or frequency help quite a bit?

[RyanKent]

Has important is it to set "priority" and "frequency" in sitemaps?

Google adheres to the protocol published on sitemaps.org. The details on those tags can be found here: http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php

In short, the settings are hints, not directives. Google MAY consider or disregard the information. I do not place any importance on this information. A properly developed site does not even require a sitemap submission at all. The primary reason I submit sitemaps is the software which creates the HTML sitemap also generates an XML sitemap and it is a one-time setup to automatically submit the sitemap to Google and Bing. Otherwise, I am not aware of any real benefit of submitting sitemaps for modern SEO.

[AdoptionHelp]

This is basically a way for sites to try to control the performance hit of being crawled too often by the bots. I don't think its ever worked to get a site deemed unimportant by the engines crawled more often than they would otherwise. If your site is not getting slammed by bots (and if it is, you probably have bigger performance problems to go after first) then, like Ryan Kent said, there isn't much use for these.