Change frequency of sitemap crawling

[Carloberg]

Hi! I'm trying to find info about this function in hubspot. Does this affect search engines ability to crawl your sitemap? 

Anyone that has any best practise on this? How should I think? 

[JessicaH]

Hi @Carloberg,

Thanks for reaching out.
I want to tag in some thought leaders to see if they can assist with this.
Hi @Ben_M @webdew @MatthewShepherd, would you be able to share your thoughts?

Thanks,
Jess 

[MatthewShepherd · Accepted solution]

Hi @Carloberg 

Sitemap URL change frequency and priority were a way to try and provide crawlers with hints as to how important the webmaster considered their URLs to be in relation to each other and how often certain pages were likely to change. This was in an effort to prioritise crawling of pages and control how often their pages would be crawled. However, this was only ever a hint and wouldn't necessarily influence a search engine's crawl behaviour.

Back in 2015, Google said "Priority and change frequency doesn’t really play that much of a role with Sitemaps anymore." https://www.seroundtable.com/google-priority-change-frequency-xml-sitemap-20273.html

I don't really see any SEO benefit to focusing on those sitemap settings. If you have content that you want to index quickly I'd suggest using Google Search Console's URL Inspection feature and Request Indexing (this is unavailable at the moment but should return to search console soon): https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/ask-google-to-recrawl

If you want Google to limit the crawling of your site you can also request a change to this through search console: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/48620?hl=en. This is more for sites where frequent crawls are causing performance issues. Most webmasters don't need this and I'd be very cautious about using it.