Live Search Webmaster Center
Posted: August 15th, 2008
It has been a little over a week since the unveiling of the complete Live Search Webmaster Center, and there seems to be only a little interest (if any) in this latest Microsoft product. Not only is there a lack of interest in general over Webmaster Center, but there’s a lack of acknowledgment over it. It appears that very few webmasters and search engine optimizers are even aware of the new Microsoft tools, with the limited number of praises, complaints, suggestions, or overall feedback.
The beta program for Webmaster Center began 11 months ago in September of 2007 with beta launch in November. From the Webmaster Center homepage:
Take advantage of everything Microsoft has to offer and get the best results possible for your business or site.
Use the Webmaster Tools to troubleshoot the crawling and indexing of your site, submit sitemaps and view statistics about your sites.
The Live Search Webmaster Center is Microsoft’s answer to Google’s Webmaster Tools (formerly known as Sitemaps), and a quick glance reveals similar functionality, but with a Live Search feel to it. In addition to the usual sitemaps.xml submitter and robots.txt validator, Webmaster Center also features information about backlinks, outbound links, and keyword data as they pertain to Live Search’s index.
Notable Aspects
Webmaster Center provides users with penalty information, meaning that you can find out whether or not your website has been flagged for spam. Websites running a content management system may find WC’s “long dynamic URLs” report useful, since “exceptionally long query strings” can send MSNbot into an infinite loop while crawling the breadth of URL permutations that are generated dynamically. Webmaster Center also reports on “unsupported content types” and lists pages with content that Live Search doesn’t index.
When To Use Webmaster Center
This is a bit of a personal decision that is ultimately up to website owners, but there are instances where Webmaster Center can be helpful, despite Live Search’s non-dominance over search traffic. For example, WC would be a useful tool in finding out why your website doesn’t show up anywhere in Live’s index. It’s also a basic web analytics tool and can diagnose if certain pages of your website are uncrawlable.
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