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In a sitemap, is it important to include information about when the url was last changed in a <lastmod> tag?

How does not including a <lastmod> tag in a sitemap affect how my site is crawled?

If I leave this information out, how does it affect indexing in search engines?

According to the protocol definition this is an optional tag.

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  • Do not worry about it. There is no effect.
    – closetnoc
    Commented Apr 17, 2016 at 14:03

1 Answer 1

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Most crawlers tend to ignore the lastmod tag as many webmasters do a poor job of keeping it up-to-date and forget to update it when they update content on the site. A sitemap is still important to identify content on the site but even if the lastmod tag shows the content hasn't been updated since the last crawl the crawler will still crawl it to confirm the content hasn't changed.

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  • Guilty as charged!!
    – closetnoc
    Commented Apr 18, 2016 at 3:52
  • The above answer is copied from this answer by Gary Illyes
    – ᴍᴇʜᴏᴠ
    Commented Apr 13, 2021 at 6:38
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    @mehov I don't see this content at the link you provided, nor do I see evidence that this answer was plagiarized from anywhere else.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Commented Mar 17, 2022 at 16:25

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