Does Google use the Sitemap "Changefreq" attribute ?

[doughayman]

Does Google make use of a sitemap's <ChangeFreq> XML attribute (i.e., "daily", "weekly", "monthly", and "yearly") values ?

Has anyone made any observations on shorter-specified durations incurrring more frequent spidering or faster indexing ? And if so, is the converse also true - do lengthier-specified durations incur less frequent spidering and indexes ?

Is this attribute just a placebo ?

Any thoughts welcome.

TIA

[tedster]

This topic came up back in March - [webmasterworld.com...]

My take on it is still the same - Google will use your input, but only as one factor in their total crawling algorithm. It's more than a placebo, but Google still makes their own decisions - including the changefreq setting as one factor.