Google Search advocate John Mueller and analyst Gary Illyes share SEO tips for the news media in a recent office hours Q&A recording.
Mueller takes turns answering questions about the correct use of the lastmod tag, and Illyes explains the benefits of another sitemap.
When to use Lastmod tags
In an XML sitemap file, lastmod is a tag that stores information about when a web page was last modified.
Its intended use is to allow search engines to track and index important changes to web pages.
Google provides guidelines for using the lastmod tag that can be used to modify search snippets.
The presence of the lastmod tag can prompt Googlebot to change the publication date of search results. This makes the content fresher and more clickable.
As a result, we sometimes tend to use the lastmod tag even for small changes to articles to make them appear as if they were recently published.
News publishers ask if the lastmod tag should be used to indicate the date of the latest article update or the date of the last comment.
Mueller said the date in the lastmod field should reflect the date when the page’s content changed so significantly that it needed to be recrawled.
However, if comments are an important part of your page, you may use the last comment date.
He also reminds publishers to use structured data and make sure the date on the page matches the lastmod tag.
“The site map file is all about finding the right time to crawl a page based on page changes, so the lastmod date reflects the date when the content changed significantly enough to be worth re-crawling. need to do it.
If comments are an important part of your page, it’s fine to use that date. Ultimately, this is a decision you can make. For the date on the article itself, we recommend that you refer to our guidelines for using dates on your page.
In particular, make sure you use dates consistently on your pages and use structured data with timezones in your markup. ”
Another sitemap for news?
Publishers have asked about Google’s stance on having both news sitemaps and general sitemaps on the same website.
It also asks if it’s okay to have duplicate URLs in both sitemaps.
Illyes explained that while it’s possible to have just one sitemap with the news extension appended to the URLs you want, it’s easier to have separate sitemaps for news and general content. URLs older than 30 days should be removed from the News sitemap.
Sitemaps that share duplicate URLs are not recommended, but are okay.
Illies said:
“You can create a single site map, a traditional web sitemap as defined by sitemaps.org, and add the news extension to any URL you want. Remove the news extension from URLs older than 30 days Note that you have to, so it’s usually easier to have separate site maps for news and web.
If a URL becomes too old to be news, simply remove it from the news sitemap entirely. Having the URLs in both sitemaps isn’t very nice, but it doesn’t cause any problems. ”
These tips from Mueller and Illyes can help news publishers optimize their websites for search engines and improve article visibility and engagement.
sauce: Google Search Central
Featured Image: Rawpixel.com/Shutterstock
