The way that Webflow does it, is it as good as what the client is asking for? If so, do you have a link I can point them to show that what Weblfow does is best practise and it does not need to be in this long format? Or, is what the are asking for actually better?
Custom sitemaps can be loaded by going to project settings > SEO and unchecking the Auto-generate Sitemap switch. Once you do, a custom area is shown that you can paste your code into.
@webdev What is the reason that you leave out the other info though? It actually says in the Webflow Settings “When you turn this on, Webflow will automatically update your sitemap when you publish your site, which can help with SEO.”, which suggests it will update the lastmod date to the correct one. Priority might be hard since you kind of would have to set that on a page level, but lastmod is exactly the kind of info only Webflow has and should update the sitemap accordingly.
As it stands Google assumes we never update anything!?
In the answer he says: “The lastmod tag is optional in sitmaps and in most of the cases it’s ignored by search engines, because webmasters are doing a horrible job keeping it accurate.”
So I guess that’s probably the solution already. It’s ignored mostly, because tools like Webflow and other websites are doing a terrible/no job at keeping it accurate. I would have thought if anyone could make it accurate it would be Webflow, but I assume they want to save themselves some computing resources not having to update sitemaps for each and every publish, which could get quite heavy with the number of websites and published changes they probably have to deal with.
