Bing is undergoing a major upgrade, revamping its crawl system to overcome issues with how sites use the “lastmod” tag.
“Lastmod”” is the tag that tells search engines when webpages on a site’s sitemap were last modified. Unfortunately, many sitemaps had the “lastmod” value set to the date when the sitemap was initially set up, not when webpages were last updated.
According to Search Engine Journal, Bing is working to address the issue:
To address this issue, Bing is revamping its crawl scheduling stack to better utilize the information provided by the “lastmod” tag in sitemaps.
This will improve crawl efficiency by reducing unnecessary crawling of unchanged content and prioritizing recently updated content.
Hopefully Bing’s revamp will help improve search results.