Is "last modified" time in XML Sitemaps important?
-
My Tech lead is concerned that his use of a script to generate XML sitemaps for some client sites may be causing negative issues for those sites.
His concern centers around the fact that the script generates a sitemap which indicates that every URL page in the site was last modified at the exact same date and time. I have never heard anything to indicate that this might be a problem, but I do know that the sitemaps I generate for other client sites can choose server response or not.
What is the best way to generate the sitemap? Last mod from actual time modified, or all set at one date and time?
-
Glad to be of help Sha
-
Thanks Alan,
I will continue to use the server response setting when generating other sitemaps and recommend that our Techs ditch the home grown script that assigns the single date and time in future.
II must say also, it is great to have such clear and reliable advice - very glad to have you around!
Thanks again.
-
Sitemap.xml files are one of many "hints" search engines use to evaluate, classify and otherwise associate relevance, importance and freshness of individual pages, and in turn, an entire site.
When the entire file flags every page with the same date/time it can have a negative impact, purely from the single-point signal perspective. If the actual pages themselves have different date/time stamps at the HTML code level, those would counter the sitemap.xml file reporting, and either resolve it or just cause confusion.
Any time search engines have a potential conflict that needs to be resolved, the potential for less than maximum value exists.
Because of these combined potential problems, SEO best practices dictate that this issue be resolved, so as to ensure it does not, in fact, lead to problems, however minor they might be on a per-page basis. If resolving the issue takes an extensive amount of time, an evaluation of how important the issue is to overall SEO. At a certain point, you cross into the realm of diminishing returns.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Getting 'Indexed, not submitted in sitemap' for around a third of my site. But these pages ARE in the sitemap we submitted.
As in the title, we have a site with around 40k pages, but around a third of them are showing as "Indexed, not submitted in sitemap" in Google Search Console. We've double-checked the sitemaps we have submitted and the URLs are definitely in the sitemap. Any idea why this might be happening? Example URL with the error: https://www.teacherstoyourhome.co.uk/german-tutor/Egham Sitemap it is located on: https://www.teacherstoyourhome.co.uk/sitemap-subject-locations-surrey.xml
Technical SEO | | TTYH0 -
Multiple Sitemaps
Hello everyone! I am in the process of updating the sitemap of an ecommerce website and I was thinking to upload three different sitemaps for different part (general/categories and subcategories/productgroups and products) of the site in order to keep them easy to update in the future. Am I allowed to do so? would that be a good idea? Open to suggestion 🙂
Technical SEO | | PremioOscar0 -
Can you have a /sitemap.xml and /sitemap.html on the same site?
Thanks in advance for any responses; we really appreciate the expertise of the SEOmoz community! My question: Since the file extensions are different, can a site have both a /sitemap.xml and /sitemap.html both siting at the root domain? For example, we've already put the html sitemap in place here: https://www.pioneermilitaryloans.com/sitemap Now, we're considering adding an XML sitemap. I know standard practice is to load it at the root (www.example.com/sitemap.xml), but am wondering if this will cause conflicts. I've been unable to find this topic addressed anywhere, or any real-life examples of sites currently doing this. What do you think?
Technical SEO | | PioneerServices0 -
Does google "see through" php/asp redirects?
A lot of the time I see companies employing a technique like this: <a target="_blank" href="/external/wcpages/referral.aspx?URL=http%253a%252f%252fwww.xxxx.ca&ReferralType=W&ProfileID=22&ListingID=96&CategoryID=219">xxxxxa> Or similarly with php. In an attempt to log all the clicks that exit their site from certain locations. When google bot comes along and crawls this page, does it still understand that this page links to www.xxxx.ca?
Technical SEO | | adriandg0 -
Having both <title>and <meta name="title"...> on a web page?</title>
Hi All, Client of mine using reversed Meta Tags format in their website and Honestly i never saw such Meta Tags formats. In my opinion having 2 Title tags and wrong reversed description tag is not correct and the needs to be removed, and other tags need to be changed,too But they said that it probably doesn't make a difference because they don't think it affects search engine results and won't remove it just based on opinion. Because weird thing is Search Engines are apparently able to index them. So should i persist on correcting them or just hope for the best and ignore it?!?!?! Thanks!
Technical SEO | | DigitalJungle0 -
Siemap.xml appearing in SERP
My sitemap.xml was appearing in the google serp for certain keywords (& not my actual page onsite). Please see image. I recently blocked my sitemap.xml with a robots.txt exclusion but now the sitemap.xml is not getting crawled in google webmaster. Is this the correct method of excluding the sitemap.xml for the serp? User-agent: * Disallow: /assets/cache/ Disallow: /assets/docs/ Disallow: /assets/export/ Disallow: /assets/import/ Disallow: /assets/modules/ Disallow: /assets/plugins/ Disallow: /assets/snippets/ Disallow: /manager/ Disallow: /sitemap.xml Sitemap: http://bryansryan.ie/sitemap.xml Any suggestions what should be done here? thanks. nQo2g.png
Technical SEO | | Socialdude0 -
ROR Sitemap
Do search engines Read RoR sitemaps ? Are they necessary ? Isn't xml sitemap enough.
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Which pages to "noindex"
I have read through the many articles regarding the use of Meta Noindex, but what I haven't been able to find is a clear explanation of when, why or what to use this on. I'm thinking that it would be appropriate to use it on: legal pages such as privacy policy and terms of use
Technical SEO | | mmaes
search results page
blog archive and category pages Thanks for any insight of this.0