WordPress version 6.5 now supports including the lastmod element in sitemap files, which can help search engines understand which pieces of content are new or updated. This can help improve crawling efficiency for search engine crawlers and reduce server load on your website.
Latest mod. Lastmod is an element you can add to your sitemap file that should represent the last time the URL was modified. Search engines look at this date when they process sitemap files for crawling purposes. In fact, Bing said last year that it would rely more on the last modified date for tracking.
Google’s Gary Illyes published this news on LinkedIn says: “The lastmod element in sitemaps is a signal that can help crawlers figure out how often to crawl your pages.”
Added:
“If you’re on WordPress, since version 6.5, you’ve had this field populated natively thanks to Pascal Birchler and the WordPress developer community. If you don’t update your WordPress installation, please bite the bullet and do so (maybe once there are no plugin conflicts). Don’t be like Gary and still run a 2* version. If you’re not on WordPress, try filling it with the last significant modification date, where “significant” loosely means a change that might matter to your users and, by proxy, to your site.”
Fabrice Canel from Bing commented on this post and said:
“A big thank you to Pascal Birchler, Gary Illyes, Google and the WordPress developer community for their fantastic contributions to WordPress 6.5. The integration of the lastmod signal into sitemaps is a game changer, providing millions of websites a big data view on when their content changes which allows to optimize the crawling activities and ensure the freshness of the content to the search engines.
For anyone reluctant to upgrade their WordPress installation, consider this feature a major motivator. As more websites implement lastmod into their sitemaps, search engines, whether AI-based or rules-based, will increasingly take advantage of this signal.
Courtesy please adopt to take control of crawling and your SEO game with real-time indexing. The right settings are IndexNow (for real-time updating) and sitemaps with lastmod (daily mode – catchup) to ensure fresh and complete coverage.
Having better visibility online is not just about having a website. It’s about finding your latest content.”
Update Currently, about 21% of WordPress installations use version 6.5, so it might make sense to check if you’re on that version if you want to improve crawl efficiency.
If you’re not on WordPress, you can ask your developers how to get accurate last modified dates on your sitemap files.
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