Bing’s AI Algorithm: Insights From Fabrice Canal’s Pubcon Keynote

Fabrice channelPrincipal Product Manager for Microsoft Bing, gave a keynote presentation at the Pubcon conference in Austin, Texas.

The room full of conference attendees listened eagerly as Canal discussed SEO for the new AI-powered Bing search engine.

As a product development team leader, the public has been highly anticipating Canal’s insights into the new and improved Bing search engine.

His presentation provided valuable information on optimizing websites for the new Bing search experience. Additionally, we learned that Bing Webmaster Tools will soon include traffic data from Bing’s AI conversation.

In this article, we’ll dive into the highlights of channel presentation and how to use the information to improve your visibility in Bing search results.

SEO recommendations for Bing AI Search

Canal suggests sticking to the same SEO playbook for content optimization for Bing’s AI experiment because it’s still early days for AI search.

Additionally, he recommends monitoring your Bing connections and data to make necessary adjustments as usage of the new Bing continues to increase, changing the way people search.

During his Pubcon keynote, Kanal stressed the importance of SEO professionals directing Bing search crawlers to high-quality content.

According to Canal, SEO will never be “dead,” and Bing needs the help of SEO professionals to optimize content for a new AI-powered algorithm.

What is it @employeea task? “To stop the crawling guessing,” adding, “Most search engines have no idea if your content has changed. … It’s not smart! It costs you money.” Which seems to be motivational to the question “Should SEOs use AI?” pic.twitter.com/mwfxGvPj5Y

– Amanda Zantal-Wiener (Amanda_ZW) February 28, 2023

Here’s what SEO professionals can do to help Bing.

Lastmod tag

The channel emphasizes the importance of setting the lastmod tag to the date the page was last modified, not when the sitemap was created.

The lastmod tag is an HTML attribute that indicates when a particular webpage or URL has received significant changes.

This tag is used in sitemaps to help search engines like Bing understand when a page was last updated.

Lastmod also helps searchers locate and access the latest content available.

When the lastmod tag is present, Bing will display the updated date in the search results. This indicates to searchers that the web page may contain new or updated information that they have not seen yet.

The channel notes that 18% of sitemaps have lastmod values ​​that are not set correctly, usually set to the date and time the sitemap was created.

index now

To help Bing discover relevant URLs and the latest changes to a web page, Canal recommends adopting them index now Instantly notifies search engines of recent modifications to the site’s content.

It also suggests having sitemaps to provide search engines with all relevant URLs and corresponding modification dates.

Most importantly, focus on writing high-quality content and using semantic tags to convey information about pages.

Canal adds that manually crawling a webpage to see if its content has changed resources, energy, and CO2 output.

The channel highlights another benefit of the index now that many don’t think about: energy savings.

Manually crawl a webpage to see if its content has changed resources, energy, and CO2 output. Therefore, using IndexNow can help reduce carbon emissions.

Kanal notes that 20 million websites have already adopted IndexNow, and he expects more top websites, search engines and content management systems to follow suit.

“I am excited to announce today that Wix will be adopting IndexNow,” @employee , emphasizing the importance of its integration with CMS platforms. Other participating platforms include WordPress, Yoast, and others it can’t disclose yet. pic.twitter.com/IHKvfW3UBS

– Amanda Zantal-Wiener (Amanda_ZW) February 28, 2023

Action Steps

Canal suggests several action items to optimize content for Bing’s new AI-powered algorithm. These include:

• Join bing.com/new
• Use indexnow.org
• Review and fix sitemap recent dates
• Use Bing Webmaster Tools
• Find out what your users want at clarity.microsoft.com
• Read the Bing Webmaster Guidelines to better understand how Bing finds, indexes, and ranks websites.

In summary

Canal’s keynote presentation at the Pubcon conference in Austin, Texas provided valuable insights into optimizing websites for Bing’s new AI-powered search engine.

As Principal Product Manager for Microsoft Bing, Canal’s expertise and guidance are highly valued by SEO professionals and website owners.

Canal emphasized the importance of using the lastmod tag correctly, adopting IndexNow, and creating high-quality content with semantic markup to optimize content for Bing’s search AI.

It also highlights the benefits of using Bing Webmaster Tools to monitor traffic data and make necessary adjustments to improve visibility in search results.

SEO professionals can greatly benefit from Canal’s recommendations and take actions such as certify indexnow.org, review and fix sitemap last modified dates, and understand Bing Webmaster’s guidelines for optimizing their content for Bing’s AI-powered algorithm.

Overall, Canal’s presentation provided actionable insights to help website owners and SEO professionals optimize their content for Bing’s new AI search.

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