Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed that Google does indeed check to see if an XML sitemap has a change in it before reprocessing the XML sitemap file. The reason Google does this is because it doesn’t want to waste resources parsing and processing a file that is not changed from the last time that file was […]
Google’s John Mueller spoke a bit more about when you should update the date in the lastmod tag in the XML sitemap file. He said on Twitter if you are “providing something new for search engines that you’d like reflected in search,” then update the date, if not, then don’t. John said, “Are you providing […]
Microsoft Bing posted a newblog post saying “for XML sitemaps, one of the most critical tags you can include in your sitemap is the “lastmod” tag.” And it will become even more critical as Bing is reworking its crawl scheduling stack to rely more on this lastmod field. Yes, by June, the way Bing decides […]
Google’s John Mueller said that pinging Google that your sitemap file has been updated can help Google index your new content quickly. He said it is simply Google practice to ping Google with when your sitemap file is updated. Of course, this does not guarantee indexing. Google still does not index everything, so just because […]