Is your site quietly going stale?
Search engines recrawl fresh sites more often. When nothing has changed in a year, pages are visited less, and rankings drift down. This reads the lastmod dates in your sitemap to see how current the site actually is.
Reads the lastmod dates your sitemap declares. Nothing is stored.
How this check works
Shipwork reads the lastmod dates in your sitemap and reports how recent the newest one is. A sitemap whose newest date is over a year old signals a neglected site — crawled less, ranked lower. It is a directional signal from your own declarations, not a full content audit.
Questions
- Why does freshness matter?
- Crawlers visit active sites more often, so fresh content is indexed faster and tends to hold ranking better.
- Where does the date come from?
- The lastmod values your sitemap declares. If you cannot maintain them, it is better to omit lastmod than to publish misleading dates.
- Is this a full content audit?
- No. It is a directional signal from your sitemap. Combine it with the sitemap and orphan checks for the full picture.