Changefreq

ELI5 — The Vibe Check

Changefreq is the sitemap XML hint telling search engines how often a page changes. Mostly ignored by crawlers, still widely used. You tell Google your homepage changes "daily" and your about page changes "yearly." Google nods politely and crawls on its own schedule anyway. It's the polite suggestion box of SEO — technically supported, practically advisory. You add it anyway because the sitemap validator complains if you don't.

Real Talk

changefreq is an optional element in XML sitemaps (sitemaps.org spec) that suggests crawl frequency: always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, or never. Major search engines (Google, Bing) have publicly stated they treat it as a weak hint at best and primarily rely on their own crawl scheduling algorithms. It remains standard practice because it costs nothing to include and may influence lower-tier crawlers that honor it.

When You'll Hear This

"Set changefreq to weekly on content pages, daily on the index." / "Changefreq won't make Google crawl faster — focus on the actual content freshness signals."