One SEO professional asked John Mueller during the submitted Question and Answer segment of his hangout about the last-modified date in their sitemaps.
Their question was: Our CMS automatically updates the last-modified date for every single change, even when adding a few words, fixing a spelling mistake, or adding an internal link.
Is this a good SEO practice? Or should the last-modified date only be updated when there are substantial changes made to the content?
John answered that he believes people do it in different ways. He does not think that from an SEO perspective, it matters all that much.
When Google looks at things like sitemap files, where there is also a last-modified date, the sitemap team ideally wants to see that date updated whenever there are any changes on the page – as it makes sense for Google to recrawl that page.
This includes things like a random link in the sidebar, for example. So from that perspective, people do it in different ways, and it should just work out regarding the last-modified date in the structured data itself. Usually, John believes it makes sense to have something aligned with when the primary content actually changes.
But, if there were technical reasons why you would have to do that immediately, or why your CMS does it immediately, John does not see a problem with that.
When it comes to dates on the page that Google sometimes shows in a snippet, what happens is they do try and find multiple mentions of that date on the page as a confirmation.
Then, Google uses that as something where they say “Well, this date is probably associated with this page. And because of this, we are fairly certain that it’s a reasonable date.” And if Google does show a date in this snippet, they would probably choose the one that’s most prominent on the page.
Google doesn’t show a date in the snippet for all pages, though. And it’s really something where you can help to guide that as well by making sure that perhaps there’s a visible date on the page also.
This happens at approximately the 41:35 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
John (Submitted Question) 41:35
Cool. Let’s see, our CMS automatically updates the last modified date for every change, even when adding a few words, fixing a spelling mistake, or adding an internal link. Is this a good SEO practice? Or should the last modified date only be updated when there’s substantial changes to the content?
John (Answer) 41:55
I think people do it in different ways. I don’t think, from an SEO point of view, it matters much. So when when we look at things like sitemap files, where there’s also a last modified date, the sitemap team ideally wants to see that date updated whenever there are any changes on the page when it makes sense for us to recrawl that page, and that includes things like a random link in the sidebar, for example.
So from from that point of view, like people do it in different ways, and it should just work out. With regards to kind of the last modified date in the structured data itself, Usually, I think it makes sense to have something aligned with when the primary content actually changes. But if there were technical reasons why you have to do that immediately, or why your CMS does it immediately, I don’t see a problem with that.
When it comes to dates on the page that we sometimes show in a snippet, what happens there is we try to find multiple mentions of that date on the page and kind of as a confirmation. And then we use that as something where we say, well, this date is probably associated with this page. And it’s fairly certain that it’s a reasonable date.
And if we were to show a date in this snippet, we would probably choose that one. We don’t show show a date in the snippet for all pages. And it’s it’s really something where you can help to guide that as well by making sure that maybe there’s a visible date on the page as well.
So if you have a news article, for example, and there’s a visible date on the page and the sitemap file has a slightly different date, then probably we will give that visible date a little bit more weight. So that might be another way that you can control that a little bit.
