Wrong Lastmod Tag

[shaunm]

Hi,

If I have a page which was last modified on 7th of March, but at the same time I am having a wrong 'lastmod' date which says that the last mod date is 3rd of March, what kind of problems will it arise? Will there be a problem at all?

Will search engines ignore the change took place on 7th and keep the old version of the same page in their index since the lastmod date tells them that the last mod date was 3rd of march?

[lucy24]

I don't think search engines care about anything other than the date they themselves retrieved the data.

[shaunm]

@lucy24

Heard that even though the lastmod is not a mandatory, it helps SE spiders from crawling a particular page thus saves them a lot of troubles.

Do you think the SE spiders retrieve the data for almost all the pages in a website, when there is no hint of a last mod date available in the Sitemap?