Crawl Field Notes

Content freshness

Content freshness describes when meaningful facts were last reviewed or changed.

Atlas version atlas-2026-07-28-v1 · Section: Quality, provenance, and observability

How it works

Accurate page versions, content hashes, Last-Modified values, and sitemap lastmod dates let recrawlers distinguish real updates from cosmetic deployments.

How to validate it

Hash normalized content, record the editorial update separately from deployment time, and submit only materially changed canonical URLs.

Common failure

Resetting every date on every deploy creates a false freshness signal and consumes crawl quota without adding information.

Machine-readable editions

The same article is available as Markdown and JSON. These alternates are linked here but are not submitted through the sitemap or IndexNow.

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