seo: make sitemap lastmod reflect real modification dates - #361
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Every URL in the live sitemap carried <lastmod>2026-09-01</lastmod> — the build date — including a blog post from July and static hosting pages. A lastmod that says "everything changed today" on every crawl carries no information, and a crawler that learns to ignore it is worse off than one that never saw the field, because it was added in the first place to tell Google what actually changed. Two causes, both needed fixing: - showLastUpdateTime was set only on the tutorials plugin, so docs and blog exposed no modification date and the sitemap fell back to build time. - The deploy workflow checked out at the default depth of 1. Docusaurus derives the date from git, and in a shallow clone every file looks like it changed in the single fetched commit — so the flag alone would not have helped. Locally this takes the sitemap from 1 distinct lastmod value to 46: docs pages now date to when they were actually edited (/docs/organizations/scim to 2026-06-01), rather than all claiming today. Note this also renders a visible "Last updated" line on docs and blog pages. That is a reasonable freshness signal for readers, but it is a visible change, not just metadata.
Deploying phasetwo-docs with
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| Status: | ✅ Deploy successful! |
| Preview URL: | https://3545196f.phasetwo-docs.pages.dev |
| Branch Preview URL: | https://seo-accurate-lastmod.phasetwo-docs.pages.dev |
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Every URL in the live sitemap currently carries
<lastmod>2026-09-01</lastmod>— the build date — including a blog post from July and static hosting pages.That's worse than having no
lastmod. It was added to tell crawlers what actually changed; a field that says "everything changed today" on every crawl teaches them to ignore it.Two causes, both needed
showLastUpdateTimewas only on the tutorials plugin. Docs and blog exposed no modification date, so the sitemap fell back to build time.Effect
Locally, the sitemap goes from 1 distinct
lastmodvalue to 46:/docs/organizations/scim//blog/scaling-keycloak-event-storage//tutorials/getting-started/run-keycloak-locally/The blog post shows 2026-08-31 rather than its July publication date because that's when the file was genuinely last edited — the author byline change. That's correct:
lastmodis about modification, not publication.Heads up: this is a visible change too
showLastUpdateTimerenders a "Last updated" line on docs and blog pages. Reasonable as a freshness signal for readers, but worth a look before merging in case you'd rather not show it. It can be suppressed while keeping the sitemap benefit if preferred.Verification
pnpm buildpasseslastmod, 46 distinct dates