Checks / Links, canonical and speed
Sitemap dates are older than the pages' own
On some pages the date the page gives for its last change is more than two weeks newer than the <lastmod> in your sitemap. Crawlers use lastmod to decide what to fetch again, so they may keep an old copy. The HTML cannot say which of the two dates is stale.
sitemap_lastmod_drift · Links, canonical and speed · Notice
What to change
Drive the sitemap <lastmod> and the page's own modified date from the same last-content-change timestamp.
How common it is
We have not measured how common this is on a sample of sites. Counts appear here when a study covers it.
About this check
| Check ID | sitemap_lastmod_drift |
|---|---|
| Report section | Links, canonical and speed |
| Severity | Notice |
| How it is decided | Measured: read directly from the page or the server's response. |
| Added | Before 19 Oct 2026 (versions 1 and 2), or a site-wide check with no version date yet |
| Status | Measured in every report |
| Report gives the code | No, the fix is described in words |
Related checks
- Sitemap has invalid entries
- No sitemap.xml
- robots.txt does not name your sitemap
- Sitemap has no useful last-modified dates
- Sitemap and site disagree
- Broken internal links
See whether it applies to your site
Paste your address and we crawl up to 10 pages and show every issue we find, with its fix. No account, no card.
Every plan crawls up to its page limit and lists these checks with the fix: plans.
How an audit works: method