Bill Slawski, Cre8asite Forum Admin, started a thread at Cre8asite Forums about a patent application Google recently published named mobile sitemaps. The abstract reads:
A method of analyzing documents or relationships between documents includes receiving a notification of an available metadata document containing information about one or more network-accessible documents, obtaining a document format indicator associated with the metadata document, selecting a document crawler using the document format indicator, and crawling at least some of the network-accessible documents using the selected document crawler.
Bill always has a translated version at his blog; SEO By The Sea.
Bill finds the document interesting, even though, as he explains, it is just for the mobile sitemaps version. The one thing that he finds that stands out is this line.
In some embodiments, information from the sitemaps may be incorporated into the computation of the page importance score.
So this "page importance score" what is it used for?
Honestly, I feel it has to do with how often Google will crawl that page for new changes. Rankings, as far as I know, it has zero impact - but frequently crawled and updated pages do have some indirect impact on rankings.
Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.
