: Sitemap time stamps = negative SEO impact? Recently experienced a 50% drop in traffic and one of the only things I changed is the sitemaps.xml We have 9 sitemaps with 50k URL each, I added

@Hamaas447

Posted in: #Seo #Sitemap

Recently experienced a 50% drop in traffic and one of the only things I changed is the sitemaps.xml

We have 9 sitemaps with 50k URL each, I added the following formatting

<URL>http://url.com</URL>
<lastmod>2016-04-29T01:55:23-04:00</lastmod>
<priority>1.0</priority>


Before it only contained the URL.

I read here that adding a timestamp may have negative impact, but the author was talking about the post itself, not the sitemap. www.shoutmeloud.com/effect-of-showing-date-stamp-on-blog-traffic-case-study.html
I know it's counterintuitive, like why would it have a negative impact? But that's the only thing that was recently changed.

Also the amount of indexed pages jumped from 500k to 2 million during the same period, so may be the 2 are related? Some kind of a temporary Google dance?

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