SITEMAP - Does <changefreq>and <image:title>have any apreciable effect?</image:title></changefreq>

[GastonRiera]

Hi everyone.

It was hard to find some actual evidence that some of the atributes to be declared in a sitemap have some real impact.
Particularly, im interested in these two: <changefreq></changefreq> and**image:title</image:title>**

I've used them in a few cases just to check their effect and couldnt see any.
Do you have any experience with these? Or any other atribute that might be helpful, in order to create a more accurate and effective sitemap?

Also, this could be a great topic to create a new Moz Blog post, the one about sitemap is 8years old.

[Shawn_Huber]

Those are optional lines in the Sitemap and are handled differently per SE.

Some great resources on best practice:

http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html

Reviewing Google's documentation they don't include them, which to me confirms what you've probably seen and that is they don't provide any value. Google's example does use image:captionthough which probably is treated similarly to alt text. </image:caption>

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/183668?hl=en#sitemapformat

[GastonRiera]

Hi Shawn,

Well, i've read those resources. I couldnt find any clue about whether the impact on SERPs or in any case those tags would help.

Have you used them? Do you find them useful?

GR.
PS: thanks for the response

[Shawn_Huber]

My sitemap file has them but only because Screaming Frog and WordPress include that information when they generate the sitemap.

Reading the Google forum, there is a reply from John Mueller from 2014 that he specifically says change frequency and priority do not affect ranking of URL's once they are indexed

https://productforums.google.com/d/msg/webmasters/w9o8bTgqb9c/7hS7hog3ZIYJ

He also states that last mod date is good for Google to know.

We all know that you can take things said by Google with a grain of salt, but this is also an instance where it is specifically stated so I would tend to believe it to be true.