I’ve been trying to understand what actually makes Google come back to a page more frequently. Some pages seem to get revisited often even without many backlinks, while others don’t seem to get picked up as quickly. From your experience, what usually influences crawl frequency the most?
Update and verify all <lastmod> dates in your sitemap (research best practices first), as it may influence crawling. Google uses accurate <lastmod> values as a hint for re-crawl priority. But... it also strongly bases crawl frequency on your internal linking structure. From my experience, search engines don't care much about your sitemap. They’ll scan it however their algorithms dictate.
Wow, that’s cool, I never thought of it like that before. I have been thinking mainly about internal linking too, though I had no idea about the value that the lastmod still carried in terms of importance by Google. Can internal linking help re-crawl faster, or does it depend on overall site activity?
Hey. I thought this method no longer worked. Care to give me a hint on how to do it if I'm using rankmath or should I just remove it's sitemap settings and go for something else ? Thanks in advance for your answer.