Are `lastmod` Timestamps in Dynamic Sitemaps Inaccurate Due to Aggressive Sitemap Caching?

That's a sharp observation about the potential for aggressive sitemap caching to skew your lastmod timestamps; it's a common pitfall. To ensure lastmod accuracy, you need to implement a strategy where these values are either pulled directly from your content management system (CMS) at request time, bypassing the sitemap's full page cache, or your sitemap is regenerated on actual content updates via a cron job or webhook. This ensures Googlebot receives precise content freshness signals, which is crucial for effective crawl budget optimization.

Hope this helps your conversions!

Hey Alejandro, that was spot on, we adjusted the sitemap generation and the lastmod timestamps are accurate now! I expected to see a more stable crawl rate across the board, but Googlebot is actually hitting some of our less important pages way more often than before.