sitemap for google

Just curious. How many of you guys put a priority code in your sitemap.xml files? Does google require us to put a code or is this just good SEO practice?

I don't think that really matters. I mean after all an xml sitemap is just a hint for a search engine, it doesn't count in the ranking algorithm.

I usually just increase priority for homepage and leave everything else at 0.5.

So if your site architecture is good, would you just ignore using a sitemap.xml?

BTW -- Since taking over the SEO role in our company, I found that our sitemap.xml feed was broken. And our old froogle feed was broken. Got them both fixed. Our SERPs are improving, but I'm doing lots of other stuff too.

The code which is putted in the website, it is just for authentication for you that only you can use the google webmaster tool.

I think priority code in sitemaps is an informal option and many search engines ignores it.
But if you want to know what it is, I can say that it tells search engines which pages are more important. Then search engines crawl them faster.

they say that html sitemap is ok seo-wise. not sure how true is that.

If the search engines can find all the pages of your site anyway, a sitemap does not help.

I think site maps are very important but search engine ignores the priority code so it is of no use...

Since reading the previous posts, I have tried changing my sitemap's priority codes. It doesn't seem to make any difference.

I use wordpress plugin created automatically generated, it is convenient