hi, i’m amr. most cms sitemap plugins stamp every url with a priority and a change frequency. google’s documentation says what it does with those fields, and with the one field it does read.
what google says, in its own words
- google ignores the priority and changefreq values
- google uses lastmod only “if it’s consistently and verifiably” accurate, and the page says it should reflect the date and time of the last significant update to the page
- “All formats limit a single sitemap to 50MB (uncompressed) or 50,000 URLs”; larger sites split the sitemap and can use an index file
- “submitting a sitemap is merely a hint”: it doesn’t guarantee that google will download the sitemap or crawl the urls in it
- you submit through the sitemaps report in search console, or with a Sitemap line in robots.txt
my reading, not google’s wording: a plugin that rewrites every lastmod to today’s date on each run is the case that can’t be called consistently accurate, because the date changes while the page doesn’t.
what to check this week
- open your sitemap.xml and read a handful of lastmod dates. do they move only when the page content changes?
- if every url carries the same date, find out which setting or plugin writes it
- stop spending time tuning priority and changefreq. google says it ignores both
- count your urls. one sitemap tops out at 50,000, so a bigger site needs several files
- open the sitemaps report in search console and confirm the file is submitted and processed without errors
where this stops applying
the page doesn’t say how google decides a date is verifiable, and it gives no figures on how much a sitemap changes crawling. so this post makes no claim about speed or ranking. a sitemap is a hint, and a clean one is still only a hint.
start scaling — if your sitemap hasn’t been looked at since the site launched, a one-hour index check usually shows what google is being told. let’s connect.
Sources: Google Search Central, “Build and submit a sitemap” (developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/create-URLs). Figures are published product documentation, not verified results from Amr’s own client accounts.