In part one, we learned more about Fabrice Canel of Microsoft Bing and spoke about indexing quality. In part two we dig more into the concern around content generation through generative AI tools and IndexNow. Then in the final part, we spoke about sitemaps and
While IndexNow is the best way to submit changes to search engines, sitemaps are more of a delicate mechanism for search engines. Sitemaps help Bing get a snapshot of what you think are the most important pages on your site.
He spoke about a study they did on XML sitemaps, which we published over here. He spoke about some of the adoption of sitemaps and how people get the lastmod date incorrectly. A lot of people get this wrong and it is why some search engines, like Google, do not trust that date. Bing might also not trust the lastmod date on your XML sitemap if you keep getting it wrong.
The future is to make indexing content in a more efficient way, through IndexNow. It is how Bing defines crawl efficiency.
Fabrice said there is a study that said 40% of the internet traffic is bot traffic and Fabrice wants to reduce that to almost zero through IndexNow.
He said machine learning helps Bing a lot know when developers implement IndexNow or Sitemaps incorrectly. So they have mechanisms in place to validate those. Bing Webmaster Tools will improve the sitemaps tool to report on sitemaps and discovery features, maybe it was this announcement?
Fabrice thinks the next big thing in search is AI, big data mining, a big understanding of things, and really satisfying the user. We are in the infancy of this stage now and it is exciting times.
You can follow Fabrice Canel on Twitter @facan or on LinkedIn.
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