Just a few more Google Sitemap queries

Sorry to be pain, but could you answer the following:

1) An on-line sitemapper indexed a test site of mine and extracted date
modified data, but when I ran the same app on my site it didn't find any of
this kind of data. Do you know how this info is provided to crawlers and is
it a vital requirement in order for such as Google to look at your pages?

2) I know Google say that they don't look at the frequency and priority
fields, but do they :0)

As my sites are dynamic ASP pages, I've adopted the approach of setting the
frequency of all of them to 'always' and the priority of all of them to 0.5,
apart from my home page which is set to 1.0.

Is this a fool hardy approach? Should I be looking at a different setup? I
can't go down them all individually as there is too many, but I still like
to have an overall correct method.

3) I know there are hundreds of theories, but does it basically boil down to
the more people that link to your pages the better page ranking you will
get? Do you benefit from adding links to other sites on your pages?

Thanks

Laphan

Hello Laphan,

Laphan wrote:

1) An on-line sitemapper indexed a test site of mine and extracted date
modified data, but when I ran the same app on my site it didn't find any of
this kind of data. Do you know how this info is provided to crawlers and is
it a vital requirement in order for such as Google to look at your pages?

Could you elaborate on this (what on-line sitemapper,
how do you know that date modifed data was extracted, etc.) ?

Hello Laphan,
Sorry, me again, I just thought that by on-line sitemapper you
meant sitemap generator, sorry to be so slow.
I suppose an on-line sitemap generator would know the
date modified data from the URL server header,
probably in a similar way in which a browser displays
date modified data in 'Page Information'.

The <lastmod> tag of the Google sitemap is optional,
in principle it could help Google to schedule crawling etc.
but I do not know if/how Google implements this at the moment.

1) An on-line sitemapper indexed a test site of mine and extracted date
modified data, but when I ran the same app on my site it didn't find any of
this kind of data. Do you know how this info is provided to crawlers and is
it a vital requirement in order for such as Google to look at your pages?