I Asked Bing's AI About Its Meltdown

+ Google's Dating Advice

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Welcome to Part I of Edition No. 46 of my weekly newsletter, providing practical analysis in the world of digital content strategy.

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Contents

Tip: When To Update the Date

Analysis: My Bing AI Chat Experience

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Tip: When To Update the Date

One factor in Google Organic search rankings is how recent the content is. You can read about “freshness systems” in the company’s official documentation.

That’s why some sites keep their publish dates as frequent as possible in order to maintain the appearance of having the freshest content possible.

Google, however, says not to do that unless there have been “significant” updates.

Some tweets from a few months ago by Google Search Advocate John Mueller:

johnmu is not a chatbot yet 🐀 @JohnMu

@amitsh053 Is there significantly new content? Then update the dates. Is there no significantly new content? Then don't update the dates. We see a lot of spam & low-quality content that just arbitrarily updates dates ("Best fax machine for 2023"), it's pretty obvious & embarassing.

johnmu is not a chatbot yet 🐀 @JohnMu

@junukn @amitsh053 There's nothing wrong with updating content, and when you make significant changes, updating the date (or using an update-date). Serious sites do that. Just tweaking, and saying "oh, still valid in 2023" is not a significant update.

The takeaway here is that keeping your content updated is important to Google. But updates that warrant a publish-date change should be significant and not simply a way to game the system into ranking higher.

Did you find this tip useful? Share it to help spread the word.

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Analysis: My Bing AI Chat Experience

Right on the heels of getting access to Notion’s in-app AI tool, I can also now use Bing’s AI chatbot.

Yes, the same one that tried to convince NY Times reporter Kevin Roose to leave his wife.

Naturally, that’s the first thing I wanted to ask about after receiving access:

I find it interesting that in the first chat bubble, sources are cited, but not in the second.

Is the citation-less answer based on its own private chats with Roose? I doubt it, but still weird.

I tweeted about this opening reaction, and the official Bing account was kind enough to respond:

Bing @bing

@Gerick @kevinroose Dang, Brad. You came out swinging 😮

Once I was finished with my fun, I employed the chatbot for the same task for which I have been using ChatGPT and Notion: to help me write a blog post.

Big emphasis on help, as you’ll remember from my last two blog posts about using ChatGPT for that specific task. I’m all in favor of AI assistance, but not so much of set-it-and-forget-it copying and pasting from whatever their output is.

Here, then, is a peek into my Bing AI chatbot experience, along with my subjective pros and cons of this still-undergoing-testing tool.

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