Sitemap Priority

The priority tag is an optional value between 0.0 and 1.0 that expresses how important a URL is relative to other URLs on the same site. It was never meant to influence ranking against other websites, only to hint at relative importance within your own.

Google has stated plainly that it ignores priority. Because the value is self-declared and easy to game, it carries no useful signal. Most sites default every URL to 0.5, which tells crawlers nothing anyway.

There is no penalty for including it, but there is also no benefit. Spend your effort on site structure, internal linking, and accurate lastmod values — the things that actually affect how pages are crawled and indexed.