Google no longer wants you to waste their time. So, if you tell them a page on your website gets updated daily – it’s now in your best interest to make sure it does.
On September 25th, Google announced the rollout of Panda 4.1 – a change to their search engine ranking algorithm that among other things is intended to help smaller websites do better in search results.
With the update, Google is supposed to reward SEOs that provide them more accurate website data, especially data that doesn’t contradict itself. This means site owners should review their XML sitemaps and make sure the change frequency on each page is properly defined.
If your Contact Us page hasn’t been updated in over a year don’t tell Google-bot that it gets updated “Daily” in your sitemap. Google is going to reward you for giving them the data they need with minimal effort on the side of Google-bot so it doesn’t have to re-crawl old content unless there is a specific reason to do so.
Accepted Sitemap Change Frequency Parameters
Here is a list of acceptable change frequency parameters and the code block below is where they get inserted.
- None
- Always
- Hourly
- Daily
- Weekly
- Monthly
- Yearly
- Never
How to Define Change Frequency in Your Sitemap
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>
<url>
<loc>http://www.yourdomain.com</loc>
<lastmod>2014-9-25</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.yourdomain.com/contact.html</loc>
<changefreq>yearly</changefreq>
</url>
</urlset>
Useful XML Sitemap Generators
Need help creating a sitemap? These free generators will crawl your site, and create an xml file you download with all your website pages.