I wonder why Google chose an "update frequency per page". I find that rather useless.
In the case of a static web-site I have a hard time to determine that beforehand. So I'll guess on the more frequent side (hourly or daily) and Google still waists its and my resources.
If I have a dynamic site, I will likely also create the sitemap dynamically and know even less on a per page basis how often I update this. Assume a catalog, how often do you think you update a particular item? There might be items you change multiple times a day and others not in months. If for example, you'd like Google to reflect a realistic "in-stock" counter, you want to have more like an hourly frequency. Again it likely waists Google's and my resources too much.
I'd rather have a frequency, how often they check my sitemap and find out the latest update stamp for each page. This would allow me to maintain those correctly and set a floor under their discovery time.
In reality it does not matter, how frequent a change is happening. From a webmaster's perspective it is of relevance how fast an update does get into Google. Has anybody said ASAP? Sure we all would like that.
However, if I tell Google to check on an hourly basis I don't want that for many pages. But I can tell googlebot a certain subset of pages in my catalog, namely the ones that I can reach through the daily, weekly, monthly, periodical. So if Google looks up my specific sitemap for this section on an hourly basis, I know that at the latest an hour after I updated that the periodical page Google takes notice and tell the world.
Another improvement would be to let Google know that I tend to update this page every Monday or on the third Tuesday of the month. Think of regular meetings and the protocols you are posting afterwards, as well as the invitation to the next meeting.
Just my initial take. Any opinions, comments?
K<o>
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