<b>The priority tag in your sitemap does nothing. Google ignores it</b>

<b>The priority tag in your sitemap does nothing. Google ignores it</b>

Somewhere a plugin is letting you set priority 0.8 and changefreq "daily" on every URL, and you're feeling organized. Google ignores both. Confirmed, on the record, for years. They're legacy fields nobody reads.

The one sitemap signal Google actually uses is lastmod, and only if you keep it honest. If lastmod reflects the real last-modified date, it helps scheduling. If your CMS stamps today's date on every URL every night, Google notices the lie and stops trusting lastmod entirely, on your whole site.

So the sitemap optimization isn't filling in more fields. It's accuracy: real lastmod, only indexable URLs, no 404s, no redirects, no noindexed pages sitting in there.

A sitemap is a list of clean URLs and honest dates. Everything else is decoration.