WordPress version 6.5 now supports including the lastmod element within sitemaps files, which can help search engines understand which pieces of content are new or updated. This can help improve crawl efficiency for search engine crawlers and reduce server load on your website.
Lastmod. Lastmod is an element that you can add to your sitemap file that should represent the last time that URL was modified. Search engines do look at that date when processing your sitemap files for crawling purposes. In fact, Bing said last year it would rely more on the lastmod date for crawling purposes.
Gary Illyes from Google posted this news on LinkedIn saying, “The lastmod element in sitemaps is a signal that can help crawlers figure out how often to crawl your pages.”
He added:
Fabrice Canel from Bing commented on that post, saying:
Upgrade. Currently, about 21% of WordPress installs are using version 6.5, so it might make sense to double check to see if you are on that version if you want to improve crawl efficiency.
If you are not on WordPress, you can ask your developers how to get accurate lastmod dates in your sitemap files.
