Re: Invalid date (Line 55463)

I had this when I first started. I ditched all the times and haven't
had it since.

I started musing halfway through about the "priority" keyword. This is
what Google says:

"The priority of this URL relative to other URLs on your site. Valid
values range from 0.0 to 1.0. This value has no effect on your pages
compared to pages on other sites, and only lets the search engines know
which of your pages you deem most important so they can order the crawl
of your pages in the way you would most like.

The default priority of a page is 0.5.

Please note that the priority you assign to a page has no influence on
the position of your URLs in a search engine's result pages. Search
engines use this information when selecting between URLs on the same
site, so you can use this tag to increase the likelihood that your more
important pages are present in a search index.

Also, please note that assigning a high priority to all of the URLs on
your site will not help you. Since the priority is relative, it is only
used to select between URLs on your site; the priority of your pages
will not be compared to the priority of pages on other sites."

So I'm not telling Google which of my pages I want presenting - but the
importance of crawling them. The obvious implication is that crawler
visits will no longer download whole sites. If the Googlebot is busy
(and it always is almost by definition) then it will only crawl a
proportion of your pages on each visit. Thus if you have thousands of
pages and the Googlebot only crawls 50 at each visit, it's pointless to
have a hundred set at 0.9 - half will get missed and it's random which
ones. For large sites prioritisation becomes an extremely important
activity. Extremely.

There's depth in the parameter: 0 to 1. You will get best control by
exploiting the whole range. As Google says this is only relevant within
YOUR site - and on most large sites, the majority of pages should have
a priority of 0.

If your lowest priority is 0.7 you're wasting two/thirds of the scope.