site.sitemap-lastmod-invalid

What to change

A finding of this rule on a page carries the exact edits for that page: the markup it quotes, and what to write instead.

When it runs

Runs on a crawl or a build directory. A warning is a problem that costs a page ranking, clicks or citations. Each finding takes 5 points off the page's score.

The severity here is the rule's usual one: a finding can be raised or lowered when the page gives a reason.

Run it, or skip it

Check a page for this rule alone, after a fix for instance:

npx @rivi-software/agentic-seo-check crawl https://example.com --rule site.sitemap-lastmod-invalid

Or from an assistant, with the MCP tool seo_crawl_site:

{
  "url": "https://example.com",
  "rules": [
    "site.sitemap-lastmod-invalid"
  ]
}

To leave it out of an audit, pass --disable site.sitemap-lastmod-invalid on the command, or disableRules: ["site.sitemap-lastmod-invalid"] to a tool.

• Errorsite.sitemap-errorA sitemap could not be fetched or parsed.
• Errorsite.sitemap-too-largeA sitemap holds more than 50,000 URLs or more than 50 MB uncompressed, which search engines do not read (error); or it is larger than this audit reads (15 MB; 5 MB on the hosted server), so it was not checked (info).
• Warningsite.sitemap-index-nestedA sitemap index lists another sitemap index; Google reads only sitemaps from an index, not further indexes.
• Warningsite.sitemap-invalid-urlSitemap <loc> values that are not full http(s) URLs, or are 2,048 characters or longer. Search engines crawl sitemap URLs exactly as listed and drop these, so the pages they name are not submitted.
• Infosite.sitemap-lastmod-futureSitemap <lastmod> values lie in the future. Google uses lastmod only when it is consistently accurate.
• Infosite.sitemap-lastmod-missingA sitemap lists URLs but gives none of them a <lastmod>, so search engines cannot tell which pages changed. Bing calls lastmod a key signal for what to crawl again; Google uses it when it is consistently accurate.
• Infosite.sitemap-lastmod-uniformEvery URL of a sitemap of 10 or more has the same <lastmod> date and time, which is the time the sitemap was built rather than when each page changed. Bing asks sites not to set lastmod to the sitemap's build time, and Google ignores lastmod values that are not accurate.
• Infosite.sitemap-other-hostThe site's sitemaps list URLs on other hosts. Google accepts them only for hosts verified in Search Console or whose own robots.txt names the sitemap.