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TL;DR My Sitemap shows a last crawl date of 2-3 days ago in Search Console and I wondered if there was a method of requesting Google re-crawl the sitemap, in the same way as you can ask it to re-crawl a page?

Explanation - I have a problem with a updated page not showing correctly in Search results. I have asked for several re-crawls over several days without luck. I believe this may be as a result of an old lastmod tag on my sitemap. I have corrected that issue and now a live view of sitemap now shows a correct lastmod. I think Google was skipping over the page re-crawl request because its last index was newer than the lastmod before I corrected that issue. Now the lastmod is newer than the last crawl date but now its not touching the Sitemap file to see the updated lastmod. I suspect it will in its own time in the next few days but still, its annoying...

Is there a way of requesting a sitemap re-crawl?

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    Google doesn't even use the last mod date in site maps because they found that most webmasters don't keep it up-to-date properly
    – Stephen Ostermiller on Strike ♦
    Aug 12, 2020 at 15:33
  • Interesting, thank you. So now I am back to wondering why the page re-crawl isn't working as expected. The crawl date showing for this particular page in Search Console is something like 6 weeks ago. No other obvious problems (robots, 403 etc.) so my only conclusion was based on the lastmod date. I'll disregard that and keep digging. Thanks for the prompt reply!
    – t2pe
    Aug 12, 2020 at 15:36
  • John Mueller from Google says that they do in fact pay attention to lastmod: twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1197115443347111936
    – I Capulet
    Aug 15, 2020 at 15:59

1 Answer 1

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Typically, you can simply submit the URL of the sitemap again via the Sitemap report in Google Search Console and it will be read soon after. However, if you have submitted the same URL many times in a short period of time without any changes in the sitemap itself, GSC starts to ignore the requests (but only for a little while). In your GSC, what is the Last Read value for your sitemap and does it reflect the last time you submitted the URL? Portion of GSC Sitemap report

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    Yes I resubmitted without going as far as deleting and re-adding. The sitemap dates updated but maybe 1-2 days later, not quicker. In that sense, you have pretty much answered my question so I will mark it as such for the benefit of others. I am still having issues with pages not being re-indexed and I can't rule out lastmod as I can't see any other logical reason.. but to be fair, thats a different issue to the original question so I will do some more digging and come back with a more focussed question if I need to. Thanks!
    – t2pe
    Aug 17, 2020 at 9:25

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