Updating Sitemap Dates and SEO

[Shawn Gossman]

If you plan to update your sitemap dates for SEO reasons, Google says you're wasting your time.

“Setting today’s date in a sitemap file isn’t going to help anyone. It’s just lazy. It makes it harder for search engines to spot truly updated pages. This definitely isn’t working in their favor.”

Some creators assumed that by updating the sitemap XML file to the current date would send "fresh content" signals to Google Search and thus help them rank better on search engines. Other creators who have been following structured SEO guidelines for decades felt such a tactic was unfair an almost spam-like tactics in order to cheat at their search engine ranking strategy.

“It’s usually a sign they have a broken sitemap generator setup. It has no positive effect. It’s just a lazy setup.”

The quotes above are by John Mueller of Google Search.

See the full article and source at: Google's John Mueller: Updating XML Sitemap Dates Doesn't Help SEO

What do you all think about this? I agree with other that it's spam-like tactics. It feels like someone is trying to cheat the system and be an advantage player of SEO.