What is Sitemap Changefreq and Priority?

In a standard XML sitemap, the <changefreq> and <priority> tags provide hints to search engine crawlers about how often a page's content changes and how important that page is relative to other pages on your site.

Does Google use Changefreq and Priority?

While Googlebot has become incredibly sophisticated and often ignores these tags in favor of its own discovery algorithms, other search engines like Bing, Yandex, and DuckDuckGo still utilize these crawl directives to manage their resources. Correctly setting these values ensures that your most important content (Priority 1.0) is checked more frequently than archive pages (Priority 0.1).

Best Practices for Frequency Analysis

• Be Realistic: Don't set every page to "Always" or "Daily" if you only update once a month. This can lead to crawlers ignoring your hints entirely.
• Logical Priority: Your homepage and main service pages should have a priority of 0.8 - 1.0, while individual blog posts or category pages should typically fall between 0.5 - 0.7.
• Crawl Budget: Use these tags to guide search engines away from low-value pages, preserving your "crawl budget" for pages that drive conversions.