Earlier this year I participated in an online focus group where questions were asked about various webmaster and SEO tools. The session was run by a third party and I was able to get them to admit it was for Microsoft. Tonight, like many others that showed interest, I received an invite to register from Nathan Buggia, Sr. Product Manager of the Live Search Webmaster Tools Team.
Similar to Google’s Webmaster Tools (Vanessa Fox interview here) and Yahoo’s Site Explorer tools (Tim Mayer interview here), the services included in this Beta of Microsoft’s Windows Live Webmaster Portal appear to be split up into three categories:
Troubleshooting
- Site crawling
- Site Indexing
- Robots.txt
- Sitemaps
Sitemaps
- Creation
- Submission (upload, autodiscovery)
- Ping
Stats
- Top search terms for your domain
- Top search terms for other domains
- Top keywords on your site
- Inbound links to your site
- Inbound links to other sites
- Outbound links from your site
- Outbound links from other sites
- Perceived site quality score
- Number of pages indexed
Search Engine Land has a blog post with more info as does the Live Search Weblog from Aug 22.
At the end of the registration form, there’s an interesting question:
“Are you willing to do public relations tasks to promote your Technology Adoption Program, such as press releases, press conversations, launch events, public website case studies and videos?”
I don’t know if everyone sees that or just the initial beta testers.
Based on how well the tools work, they might be a useful alternative or redundancy. However, if they don’t work so great, I doubt too many webmasters will use them since Google and Yahoo tools have been out there and tested for a while.
Since I was registering with Firefox, there were issues after I hit submit so I’ll try again later with MSIE.
Lee,
This looks like it might be something useful from MSN Live Search. Here is more information on the beta project: http://www.seopittfall.com/?p=338
Thanks,
SEOpittfall
Thanks Stephen. I think we filled out the same form. Did you get actual access to the portal? I have not seen it yet.
Hi Lee,
Its nice to see they are closer on this. The Top search terms for other domains has me really curious. They aren’t going to disclose the search terms that are directing traffic to domains other than your own are they?
Or are they talking about a simple scan of any domain and listing search terms found in the pages?
What do you make of that?
Lee,
I received the email request about a week ago. I haven’t seen the GUI yet, but I am really looking forward to it. I will let you know as soon as I do.
Cheers
Is this service launched???
Not that I am aware of yet. I was invited, but the official start has not been announced that I am aware of. Have you heard anything Lee?
Lee,
Have you heard anything about the beta launch yet?
No I haven’t but I’ll ping my MSFT contact again.