Bing is revamping its crawl scheduling to better use the information provided by the "lastmod" tag in XML sitemaps.
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According to a recent study by Bing, most websites have XML sitemaps, with the “lastmod” tag being the most critical component of these sitemaps.
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The “lastmod” tag indicates the last time the webpages linked by the sitemap were modified and is used by search engines to determine how often to crawl a site and which pages to index.
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However, the study also revealed that a significant number of “lastmod” values in XML sitemaps were set incorrectly, with the most prevalent issue being identical dates on all sitemaps.
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Upon consulting with web admins, Microsoft discovered that the dates were set to the date of sitemap generation rather than content modification.
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To address this issue, Bing is revamping its crawl scheduling stack to better utilize the information provided by the “lastmod” tag in sitemaps.
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This will improve crawl efficiency by reducing unnecessary crawling of unchanged content and prioritizing recently updated content.