Sitemap - lastmod date always current time

[soholads]

One of our competitor's sites has a sitemap that every time your refresh it, the 'lastmod' date and time changes to the current time.

Firstly, what are they using to do that and secondly, does it impact SEO? I'm guessing it could as it might seem the site is always updating to crawl bots.

Thanks

 

[soholads]

Just giving this a bump to see if anyone knows. Thanks

 

[Castamir]

I don't know what they use but fresh contents tend to do better, this needs more experiment. I recommend that you should run it on your website and confirm.

 

[sekt]

You can store your sitemap in a PHP file and rewrite the URL from .php to .xml. Now you can get the current date and time on every page load, while the source looks like normal XML.

 

[Bugfisch]

You can store your sitemap in a PHP file and rewrite the URL from .php to .xml. Now you can get the current date and time on every page load, while the source looks like normal XML.

The .xml isn't even needed - but you must send a XML header like Content-type: application/xml; charset=utf-8

 

[Gogol]

To be honest, I think it is more of a bug than a feature. The lastmod time should only be the updated_at time (otherwise, it looks like spam to whatever bot is crawling it), not the current time. I would recommend not doing what your competitor is doing. If you create a custom sitemap, make sure you set the lastmod as the updated_at time.