Microsoft Bing posted a new weblog put up saying “for XML sitemaps, one of the vital crucial tags you possibly can embrace in your sitemap is the “lastmod” tag.” And it’ll turn into much more crucial as Bing is transforming its crawl scheduling stack to rely extra on this lastmod subject.
Sure, by June, the best way Bing decides what to crawl shall be extra depending on the lastmod tag. Fabrice Canel from Microsoft wrote, “we’re revamping our crawl scheduling stack to higher make the most of the data offered by the “lastmod” tag in sitemaps.” That is being performed so it will probably “improve” the “crawl effectivity by decreasing pointless crawling of unchanged content material and prioritizing lately up to date content material.”
“We’ve got already begun implementing these modifications on a restricted scale and plan to totally roll them out by June,” he added.
So ensuring your lastmod date is correct is now much more necessary. It must be the final time you modified the URL, not the time the URL was first revealed and never the time the XML sitemap file was generated. The truth is, that’s the greatest challenge Bing discovered with the sector, that it usually simply exhibits the date the XML sitemap file was generated and never the date the web page of the URL was final modified.
Listed below are some knowledge factors Bing put collectively on XML sitemaps:
- 58% of hosts have at the least one XML sitemap.
- 84% of those sitemaps have a lastmod attribute set.
- 79% have lastmod values appropriate.
- 18% have lastmod values not appropriately set.
- 3% has lastmod values for under a few of the URLs.
- 16% of those sitemaps haven’t got a lastmod attribute set.
- 42% of hosts don’t have one XML sitemap
Oh, Bing nonetheless desires you to make use of the IndexNow protocol for probably the most environment friendly crawl resolution however in case you do not – be certain your lastmod date is correct.
By way of Google, in 2015 Google mentioned they do not actually use the lastmod date however then modified that in 2020 they mentioned they do. The present Google documentation says, “Google makes use of the lastmod worth if it is constantly and verifiably (for instance by evaluating to the final modification of the web page) correct.”
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