<b>Lying in lastmod is quietly throttling you</b>

<b>Lying in lastmod is quietly throttling you</b>

The trick everyone tries: bump every sitemap lastmod to today so Google re-crawls everything. Cute. It works exactly once.

Google compares your claimed lastmod against what it actually finds. When today's "modified" page is byte-identical to last month's, you've taught it your timestamps are noise. After enough lies, it ignores your lastmod entirely and falls back to its own change-detection — and now your genuinely updated pages get crawled slower.

lastmod only helps if it's honest. An accurate timestamp on a real change is one of the few signals that genuinely pulls crawl forward.

You're not gaming demand. You're spending trust you can't rebuy.

Tell the truth or say nothing.