A clean lastmod field recrawled 90K pages in 9 days. Free.
The consensus is that sitemaps don't help crawling — "Google ignores them." Mostly true. But one publisher tested the one part Google actually respects: accurate <lastmod>.
They had 90,000 articles with a fossilized lastmod stuck at site-launch date. They fixed it to reflect real edit timestamps and nothing else — no new links, no pings.
Result: Search Console's "crawled" count on those URLs jumped within 9 days. Google's John Mueller has said plainly that a trustworthy lastmod is used as a crawl-scheduling signal.
No tool. No budget. Just stop lying in your sitemap.
Actually, that's the catch — Google trusts lastmod only if you don't abuse it. Fake "updated today" on everything and the signal gets ignored sitewide.
Budget Myths
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A clean lastmod field recrawled 90K pages in 9 days. Free.
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