Webmasters have always wondered the true importance of the priority and change frequency settings when generating XML sitemaps for their website – however we never really had any definite answer.
Various members of the SEO community & various webmasters have made their assumptions – however none of the big search engines have ever stood up and said anything … until now. Google’s John Mueller was finally asked the question in a video hangout session late last week:
Does priority and frequency matter in a sitemap? If not, how can we tell Google to crawl specific pages on daily or high priority?
And here is what he answered:
Priority and change frequency doesn’t really play that much of a role with Sitemaps anymore.
This is something where we’ve tried various things but essentially, if you have a sitemap file and you are using it to tell us about the pages that were changed or updated, it is much better to just specify the time stamp directly so that we can look into our internal systems and say we haven’t crawled since this date therefore we should crawl again.
And just crawling daily doesn’t make much sense if your content doesn’t change. So that is something where we see a lot of sites they give us this information in the sitemap, they said it changes daily or weekly, and we look in our database and it hasn’t changed in a month or years…
So what I’d really recommend is using the timestamp.
If you’d like to watch the full Hangout I have included the video above, linked specifically to the time when this question was brought up.