Feature Request: Option to remove lastmod from sitemap

[kennylajara]

• [x] I've read and understood the contribution guidelines.
• [x] I've searched for any related issues and avoided creating a duplicate issue.

Please give us a description of what happened.

I have a website where some parts of the pages may change dinamically from time to time without having to go directly to the page to update it.

I think that having the last mod field on the pages’ sitemap is going to tell Google: “Hey, this page have not been modified in a while, you don’t need to crawl it again”.

And for that reason, I want to remove the “last mod” field from the pages sitemap and let Google to choose when its going crawl my pages again.

I want to keep this field on posts’ sitemap, just want to remove it for pages.

Please describe what you expected to happen and why.

You to add an option to remove the "lastmod" from sitemap, because on cases when the content change dinamically, to have the lastmod on the sitemap may hurt the SEO of the page and this plugin is intented to make improve the SEO.

Technical info

• WordPress version: 5.2.1
• Yoast SEO version: 11.2.1

[Djennez]

Looking at articles that speculate about the lastmod tag I can't find any indication that Google will penalize older or newer articles based on the lastmod tag. However, I think @jono-alderson might be able to go into a bit more detail about this.

[jonoalderson]

Google won't choose not to recrawl pages based on a stale lastmod time.

However, I think that there's a valid use-case for highly dynamic pages. In principle, the lastmod time should indicate the time at which the (main content of the) page was last significantly updated/modified, which may not necessarily coincide with the last time that the user hit save/publish.

We should allow the value to be filterable, and by extension, removable - though I'd not recommend the latter.

[talemt]

Any updates on this? It is critical, for example, pages with the wordpress RSS block, content getting updated constantly, dynamically and the sitemap showing same static old Last Mod

[kevinbenabdelhak]

Hello :)

I created a plugin that allows you to control the update of lastmod when publishing or minor updating a page on WordPress : https://github.com/kevinbenabdelhak/WP-XML-Lastmod