Can a conflict of priority '1.0' have your page banned on yahoo and bing?

Here is the situation:

I use vbseo to generate sitemaps for all my site including static pages. Static pages are included in a static file and added automatically by VBSEO.

The main forum page (mysite.com/forum) is given a 1.0 priority automatically by VBSEO. At the same time I gave my home page a 1.0 priority too. So on the generated sitemap, we have two urls with the same top priority.

In the generated sitemap file, the two URLs are the first ones but my home page URL is second.
Recently, my home page has been removed from Yahoo's index and Bing index too. All other pages rank fine. I suspect that this comes from the fact that these search engines remove one of the 2 URLs that I have specified with the 1.0 priority. That could be a possibility.

So what I want to do is to assign a 0.9 priority to 'the mysite.com/forum' page to make it cleaner. How do I do it? I looked at all parameters but I couldn't find a way to set the priority for this page.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Jean-Paul

Hello John ,

Priority can't get your site dropped from index. It maybe related to something else.

Hello Mert,

Is there a way in VBSEO to change the priority of the root of the forum? Or is it assigned automatically by VBSEO?

Thanks,

Jean-Paul

John, the page priority in sitemap can't drop any page from Google search
There is some things happened when Google update your number of pages indexed in Google so that's can happen and that's back to the normal in short time

Hello Marco,

Everything is fine with Google. The home page hasn't disappeared.

However the home page has vanished in Yahoo (some months ago) and now with Bing. It is very strange. I will investigate more and post here if I find something.

Jean-Paul

Hello John,

If the sitemap is the problem so it should also have the same problem with Google, because the same sitemap is submitted in Google,Yahoo and Bing

So your sitemap is fine don't make any changes in your vBSEO Settings or in vBSEO Sitemap settings

The priority figure is simply a suggestion for the search engines to use. They will still rank or not how they see fit.

I wouldn't waste any time with yahoo... it will be non-existent in short time (since they merged with bing).

What are you doing to come to the conclusion that bing doesn't have your homepage?
search by domain?

Do you also have a webmaster area set up?
Webmaster Center - Bing

I just want to follow-up this issue with you.

I don't know how bing manages sitemaps but the homepage disappeared from bing's index. All other pages ranked fine.

As I explained it before, the problem may come (I say may) from the fact that 2 important pages were generated with a priority of 1.0 in the sitemap.

The second page in the list is the homepage.

What I did was to give a 0.9 priority to the homepage so I have only one page with a 1.0 priority.

Some days later our homepage is back on bing, ranking in number one position.

The problem didn't happen with Google.

I don't know if the homepage came back because I changed its priority but it could be the case. More experiencing is required.

I hope this may help other people.

What I would like from VBSEO is the ability to set-up the top priority of the forum page. I think it would give more sense to have my homepage with a priority of 1.0 and the forum with 0.9. May be something you can add in a future release.

In any case thanks a lot for your comments.