Sitemap - lastmod date always current time

S

soholads

Newbie

Oct 30, 2013

34

13

• Apr 21, 2022

• #1

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

 

S

soholads

Newbie

Oct 30, 2013

34

13

• Apr 29, 2022
• Thread Starter Thread Starter

• #2

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

 

Castamir

BANNED

Sep 4, 2019

1,200

1,058

• Apr 29, 2022

• #3

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.

 

S

sekt

Registered Member

Feb 8, 2022

82

52

• Apr 29, 2022

• #4

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

Regular Member

Nov 5, 2021

363

284

• May 2, 2022

• #5

sekt said:

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.

Click to expand...

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

 

Gogol

Administrator

Staff member

Moderator

Executive VIP

Jr. VIP

Sep 10, 2010

11,806

26,657

• May 2, 2022

• #6

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.