Google has made a small note to the sitemap documentation to add that the lastmod date specified in the sitemap file "should reflect the date and time of the last significant update to the page." This ...

Your sitemap is a conversation with a machine that decides whether to listen based on your credibility, not your formatting.

Google might be having some weird bug with XML sitemap files that have hyphens within the final name. So if your sitemap file name is /sitemap-10.xml it will trigger a "couldn't fetch" error, but ...

Google confirms that automatically setting current dates in XML sitemaps provides no ranking benefit. Sitemap dates should only be updated when actual content changes. Google can easily identify and ...