Change frequency value in Sitemap - any importance to it?

[born2run]

Hi, I'd like to know if the Change frequency value is of any importance to SEO optimization and sitemaps.

I have a website where I place about 20 articles everyday. These are news related to other people.

What value should I put for the change frequency in my sitemap?

Thanks in advance.

[born2run]

Also what are the main variables important in a sitemap?

[aakk9999]

I have a website where I place about 20 articles everyday. These are news related to other people. What value should I put for the change frequency in my sitemap?

The changefreq element is not a site-wide element, it is url-focused. So once you publish your article, the changefreq would depend on whether the article will change in the future or not and if so, how often.

I personally omit changefreq from my sitemaps. I am not sure whether Google pays any attention to it at all since I have seen so many sitemaps where changefreq is set to "daily", yet the page never changes.

Perhaps Google may pay attention to it initially but it will soon learn how often pages on the site change and how this corresponds with the info in Sitemap. In any case, Google says that changefreq is only a "hint"

Build a sitemap
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/183668?hl=en [support.google.com]

With regards to other elements in the sitemap, John Mueller mentioned <lastmod> element as being useful to Google:

If you're using the last modification date in the Sitemaps file, I'd just leave changefrequency & priority out. You don't need to specify them. We'll pick up changes based on the last modification date. None of the settings in the Sitemap file affect ranking of the URLs once they're indexed -- they're only to help get the content crawled & indexed as appropriate.

https://productforums.google.com/d/msg/webmasters/w9o8bTgqb9c/7hS7hog3ZIYJ [productforums.google.com]

[born2run]

Thanks a lot for the info!

Regards