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Imagine I have this blogging / ecommerce website with 1000 posts / products. And I've built a sitemap for it, which is dynamically generated. Basically it's a list with a bunch of <url> and <lastmod> tags.

I'm pretty sure that the crawlers expect me to update the <lastmod> dates for whatever product or blogpost that I edit and change the text content (or change the images). Add something new, update information, etc. Basically, anything that users will SEE differently when they enter my page. This makes sense.

But my question is:

I have a dynamic single page website. So I don't keep static pages. I generate and render them (server-side) at run time. So what if I decide that all of my blogposts now should render inside a <main> or <article> tag instead of a div? Or what if I add some structured meta data to add price and review properties for my products, or to add structured data for breadcrumbs.

You see what I mean? The content that the user sees hasn't changed. But I've updated some tags that the CRAWLER will interpret differently. The text/image content is the same, but the HTML content has changed. And this could even have impact on my ranking, since I'm throwing in new tags that might get me better SEO.

But now what should I do? The changes I made now will render the 1000 posts / products in a different way with the new tags (in the perspective of the crawler). Should I update the <lastmod> tag to ALL of my 1000 urls in my sitemap? The user will still see the same text/image content and will not notice any difference.

If I do update all the 1000 <lastmod> tags, won't the crawler think that it's "weird" that now all of my urls have been updated on the same day? Since they'll all have the same <lastmod> tags. Does it make sense?

Please, any help is appreciated. Thanks

cbdeveloper
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  • You're overthinking it, just resubmit the sitemap. The tag purpose is how often the content could change so it has gives it some sort of crawl priority, you dont have to change the tag because you changed some meta tags. By resubmitting the sitemap Google will take a faster look at them again. – John Could Nov 20 '19 at 09:08
  • Maybe. But that's what google says about re-submitting a sitemap: "You shouldn't need to resubmit a sitemap that we already know about, even if you've changed it. Google will notice any changes the next time we crawl your site." From: Google – cbdeveloper Nov 20 '19 at 09:11
  • The <lastmod> tag should mean the last date the content HAS changed, shouldn't it? My question is whether that change is a text/content change or an HTML change should count as well. – cbdeveloper Nov 20 '19 at 09:13
  • https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/108491/what-does-url-lastmod-in-a-sitemap-really-mean - Based on this i would say its content and meta data only. – John Could Nov 20 '19 at 11:20
  • Thanks. From this excerpt: should be the last time the content of the page changed meaningfully. If a change is meant to be visible in the search results I think that if I add some extra meta tags or better semantic HTML tags, I would update all of my <lastmod> tags. Because those changes would be visible in the search results. Do you agree? I wouldn't do the same for mere style changes, for example. What do you think? – cbdeveloper Nov 20 '19 at 11:27
  • Mere style changes and meta-tag i think wont count, as you're updating your site for bots not humans. From my understanding this refers to changes in the content which would impact the reader as well as meta data meaning title and h1 tags which would again give more context to the reader and better semantics (in terms of google results from Google) for Google. I think you want to make changes similar to adding an article schema for example which i dont think fits this scenario. This is my take on it hopefully someone else can elaborate. – John Could Nov 20 '19 at 11:39
  • I think this settles it: John Mueller from Google replied my on Twitter: https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1197115443347111936 – cbdeveloper Nov 20 '19 at 11:41
  • Please don't ask the same question a second time. – Stephen Ostermiller Nov 20 '19 at 11:56

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