Today we’re happy to take the “private” label off our Webmaster Tools beta, and open it up to all webmasters and SEO professionals. This is a first step by Live Search to make it easier to ensure your site is getting the best crawling, indexing, and representation in Live Search results possible. Our goal is that it will lead to better traffic for your site, and better search results for our customers.
In addition to the tools, we’re also launching:
- Webmaster Blog – to let you know what’s going on and provide you with the technical information you’re looking for from Live.
- Live Webmaster Center – a convenient portal, consolidating all of Microsoft’s information and services for webmasters in one easy-to-remember URL: http://webmaster.live.com
So, what should you do with all of this news? Easy:
- Make sure there aren’t any problems with MSNBot and your site (if there are let us know) – sign into the tools, verify your site and ensure that Live Search is indexing your pages, we haven’t identified any of your content as SPAM, and there are not any issues with your Robots.txt file. If any pages have been blocked for being spammy, fix the issue, then follow the instructions to complete a re-inclusion request.
- Let us know about your sitemap to get the best crawl – enter the URL of your sitemap file, or sitemap index file, into the tool so you know we have access to all of your sites content. This will help us find all that really deep content on your site that might not be well linked.
- Add our blog to your RSS reader – we have lots more features in the works, so add our blog to your RSS reader so you know what’s been shipped.
–Nathan Buggia, Lead Program Manager – Live Webmaster Team
