: Sitemap submission : Do sitemaps need to be resubmitted when they are updated? In short: Should I resubmit my sitemap through Google Webmasters Tools every time I replace a sitemap.xml with

@Murray432

Interesting article, which suggests (at least at the time of writing) that there may be some benefit in re-submitting, despite Google saying otherwise.
www.lauradhamilton.com/resubmitting-your-sitemap-to-google

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@Voss4911412

Search engines will crawl your site more frequently if your content changes more often. If you're just adding new URL's, then there's no need to regenerate your sitemap.xml each time.

However, you should update the last modification date in your sitemap by modifying the lastmod attribute, and specify the changefreq for any URL's that will periodically change.

A sample sitemap with these attributes is:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">

<url>

<loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>

<lastmod>2013-07-26</lastmod>

<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>

<priority>0.8</priority>

</url>

</urlset>


As seen above, you can also specify the priority attribute for URL's that you deem most important relative to the other URL's in your sitemap, such as new ones.

You can also use the Fetch as Google tool to trigger crawling for a site, and for newly updated URL's too - see: Submit URLs to Google with Fetch as Google

Lastly, it's a good idea to test your sitemaps before you submit them to see if there's any issues with them. Here's how: Test Sitemaps & Features In Google Webmaster Tools

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@Megan663

Google periodically checks your submitted sitemap.xml file for updates. You only need to submit it once.

See: How often does GWT check dynamic sitemaps?

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