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by Aachen 634 days ago
> sitemap.xml spec already has fields for indicating the last time a page was changed

I did not know that bit! I'm considering adding this to my site now, because it sounds like it would save a lot of resources for everyone. Do (m)any crawlers use this information in your experience?

1 comments

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...

Google ignores the priority and change-frequency fields, but they do use the last-modified field to skip pulling pages which haven't changed since their crawler last visited. Not sure exactly which signals Bing uses but they definitely use last-modified as well.