Sitemap.xml order - the organization of the sitemap in your tree levels 
Author: John W.I have made it to the point where I am practicing with pages on-line. They did upload well, responsiveness is behaving, got a couple of cart issue, but I will study more on that.
But the sitemap.xml, that is a spec screwy. Since the program publishes in a flat structure, that is okay. But in the Map of the website, you are allowed levels and sublevels. You can move pages in and out of them, locate them elsewhere, you can rearrange the levels to make sense of the site. Thus the sitemap.xml is an outline of that sense.
But, the sitemap.xml is listing the pages in it in the order that you create them in the program. Thus, if I add 3 new pages now, place them in the same level or in different places, within the sitemap.xml, they are on the bottom of the list. So the sitemap.xml is collecting data to add to it, but not rearranging the order to match to the MAP.
How can I get the sitemap.xml to publish my list of html pages to follow the order I have them in the map?
If you would like to look at it, it is at http://www.eclectic-ware.net/sitemap.xml
Please do not pay attention to the nonsense on the pages. I am just whipping this together fast, it is not supposed to make sense, nor is it my main domain. Once I get the hang of the program, I will quickly overwrite this domain with 2 or 3 pages just to clean it up, and my main website which is a dot com, will end up being easily 300 to 400 pages. I cannot practice on my real site because it would scramble it - and sadly make it inoperative because I am still not ready with this software.
The sitemap.xml is not intended as a structure, but as a message to the search engines.In the project, you can make the settings for the sitemap under 3 Sitemap - Property of the page - Advanced: Entry yes / no, priority 1-10 and update frequency.
If you want to display the page structure, you can, for example, create a page with many menus so that the structure becomes visible.
Example: https://www.plocher-produkte.ch/imsitemap.html
JJ.
Author
Hi JJ,
We have spoke before. An organized sitemap.xml is an instruction to Google about site structure, especially if your URL's are in sublevels. When in a flat structure, think of it this way: If you take a deck of cards and put all the suits together, you have 4 blocks of information. Each entry in that block is related. Now shuffle the deck. How is one entry now related to the other when scrambled. Google has said it uses the sitemap.xml to understand how a site is laid out. If laid out like a scrambled deck of cards, that does not send a good signal to Google.
I was just wondering if there was a function for the sitemap.xml to "re-sort" and thus post the entries in it to coincide with the order of the MAP. Think about why we have the MAP and why we put pages where we do. When you have a whole section about dog collars, and all of a sudden a page for cat food is in the dog collars section, who will find it?
I will suggest this as an idea to have the ability to resort the sitemap.xml to follow the order of the pages as shown in the map.