Should you still fill in the priority and changefreq attributes in your XML sitemaps?

Why did Google decide to ignore these attributes?

The answer is simple: webmasters massively cheated. When an attribute is designed to indicate the relative priority of a page, but 90% of websites mark all their URLs with priority="1.0", the information becomes useless. Google was faced with a polluted signal, lacking discriminative value.

The same problem affected changefreq. Websites indicated "daily" or "hourly" for content that never changed, hoping to force more frequent crawls. Faced with this cacophony, Google made the pragmatic decision to completely ignore these two attributes.

What elements are really utilized in an XML sitemap?

Google focuses on two elements: the URL itself (to discover pages) and the lastmod tag (to detect updates). That's it. The sitemap becomes what it should have always been: a list of URLs with their last modification date.

Specifically, your sitemap serves to signal the existence of pages — especially those poorly linked within your structure — and to indicate when they have changed. The rest is noise. Lastmod retains real usefulness if you fill it out rigorously: it can influence the crawl frequency on recently modified pages.

Does this statement really surprise SEO professionals?

Let’s be honest: most seasoned SEOs suspected this. Empirical tests have shown for years that priority and changefreq had no measurable impact on crawl or ranking. This statement from Mueller simply officially confirms what field experience suggested.

The real question remains: why does Google keep these attributes in the Sitemap protocol specification if they are ignored? Probably because other search engines (Bing, Yandex) still use them — or claim to. But for Google Search, it's over.

• Priority and changefreq have been completely ignored by Google for several years now
• Only URL and lastmod count in your XML sitemap files
• The widespread abuse of these attributes rendered the signal unusable
• The lastmod tag retains value if it accurately reflects real changes
• Other search engines may still reference these attributes, but Google no longer does

Is Google's position consistent with field observations?

Absolutely. I have conducted dozens of audits where priority and changefreq were modified without ever seeing the slightest impact on crawl frequency or ranking. Server logs consistently confirmed this: Googlebot ignored these signals.

What truly works to influence crawl? The freshness of the content, internal linking, and the popularity of the pages. If a section of your site is crawled too rarely, it's rarely a sitemap issue — it's an authority, linking, or content quality problem.

Should you completely remove these attributes from your sitemaps?

Not necessarily. If other engines still exploit them (and some CMS generate them by default), leaving them doesn’t hurt. They have no negative impact, Google simply ignores them. But don't waste time finely optimizing them anymore.

Instead, focus your efforts on lastmod. Ensure it reflects actual content changes, not just a system timestamp change. A reliable lastmod can speed up the consideration of your important updates. [To verify]: Google has never specified what granularity it interprets lastmod with or whether it penalizes false updates.

What common mistakes persist despite this clarification?

Many SEOs continue to optimize priority based on myths: "category pages at 0.8, product pages at 0.6". It's a waste of time. Google doesn't even look at these values. Worse: some SEO audit tools still flag "issues" if all your pages have the same priority.

Another frequent mistake: believing that changefreq="daily" will force a daily crawl. No. Googlebot decides on its crawling frequency based on its own observations, not your declarations. If your content never changes, indicating "hourly" won’t change anything — and Google knows it.

What should you concretely do with your existing sitemaps?

First, stop wasting time on priority and changefreq. If your CMS generates them automatically, leave them as is. If you fill them out manually, stop immediately — it's time better spent elsewhere.

Focus on two things: the quality of your URLs (only include indexable pages, remove unnecessary pagination, tracking parameters) and the reliability of lastmod. An update of lastmod should correspond to a significant content change, not an automatic recalculation at each sitemap generation.

How to check if your sitemap is truly utilized by Google?

The Search Console indicates how many URLs submitted via sitemap have been discovered and indexed. If you see a massive gap (80% of URLs non-indexed), the problem is not your sitemap — it's the quality or accessibility of those pages.

Analyze your server logs to confirm that Googlebot is visiting the pages recently added or modified in your sitemap. If a URL with a recent lastmod isn't crawled within 72 hours, it likely lacks SEO juice via internal linking or is blocked by another factor (robots.txt, noindex, canonical).

What mistakes should you absolutely avoid?

Don’t overwhelm Google with giant, poorly segmented sitemaps. Respect the limit of 50,000 URLs per file, and use a sitemap index if necessary. Separate content by type (blog, products, categories) to facilitate diagnostics in Search Console.

Avoid also submitting URLs with unnecessary dynamic parameters, 301 redirects, or noindex pages. Google may discover them, but you're wasting crawl budget. A clean sitemap = fewer, better-targeted URLs, with reliable lastmod.

• Remove priority and changefreq from your optimization process (or ignore them if generated automatically)
• Ensure lastmod reflects true content changes, not a system timestamp
• Clean your sitemap: remove non-indexable URLs, redirects, unnecessary paginated pages
• Segment your sitemaps by content type for easier monitoring in Search Console
• Monitor server logs to confirm that Googlebot visits pages with recent lastmod
• Only submit important URLs — a sitemap of 10,000 relevant pages is better than one with 100,000 mediocre URLs