Skip to content

Rule · SEO

<lastmod> invalid, in the future, or identical across entries

seo/sitemap-lastmodwarnvoid seoupdated

Why it matters

Google uses lastmod only if it is consistently accurate; lastModified: new Date() stamps every URL with the build time, so Google learns to ignore it.

How to fix it

Use each page's real content-modified date (from CMS or git) in W3C Datetime format.

References

void seo reports 60 rules in this category. What search engines need from the raw response: status codes, titles and descriptions in <head>, self-referencing canonicals, one h1, crawlable links, Open Graph, icons, robots.txt and a sitemap with real dates.