LiveSide - News blog : Webmaster Portal

Bing Toolbox

Sunshine — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 11:24:16 GMT

Are you a webmaster, a publisher, a developer or maybe an advertiser? Now you can find everything Bing you need at the Bing Toolbox.

As you can see in the screenshot above (click to enlarge), you can submit your domain URL and sitemap to Bing directly. Furthermore you can get a Bing AppID there or go to the PowerToys. Of course you can also see your managed sites and find other useful links there.

You may even want to check back regularly there as you an see the latest news and announcements are there too! So forget all about these separate URLs and go to the Bing Toolbox to find it all!

This is the team’s first effort and they will be building out the site with new content and updated tools as they become available. Got Feedback? Leave it at the forums ;)

Bing Webmaster Blog - New tools for webmasters in the Bing Toolbox

MSNbot crawling issues: update

Kip Kniskern — Thu, 21 May 2009 18:30:52 GMT

The Live Search Webmaster Center blog just posted a follow up regarding numerous complaints about the behavior of MSNbot, which last month was wreaking havoc on some of the websites it was crawling, according to reports.

Last week, a patch to the crawler was deployed, which should significantly reduce the problems. Interestingly, while part of the problem involved “cloaking detection”, where websites try to trick search engines into better positioning, some of the problems were also caused by attempts to gain much quicker RSS feed information:

Unfortunately, things can and do go wrong from time to time. The initial complaints, that we were over-crawling some servers with our cloaking detector, was compounded by and also confused with the new release of our feed crawler that was also overzealous in its attempt to crawl and provide up-to-the-minute results. However, we have taken all of the feedback you have provided and made some improvements.

The blog post goes on to suggest ways to optimize websites to help to get feed content out quickly, including aggregating feeds, and using sitemaps and robots.txt.

Live Search: What To Do When You Have Complaints About MSNbot

Sunshine — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 10:13:23 GMT

Making improvements to the quality and depth of the Live Search index often affects how MSNBot collects data. So what if you have complaints about the bot behavior and crawl frequency, how do you leave feedback?

As the Live Search development team is busy making improvements and new algorithms are tested, the Live Search Webmaster Center team reminds us how to do that. You can do one of the following:

· Check the Live Search Webmaster Center’s Crawling/Indexing Feedback and Discussion forum. Check to see if your feedback has already been addressed in an existing thread. If not, post your feedback in a new thread. Please be sure to include all of the pertinent details surrounding your incident. This will help us investigate the incident from our side and assist in the process of providing a response to you.

If you don’t want your details posted in the forum, please post the basic information and identify the issue as a private matter. The Webmaster Center forums moderator will contact you directly for more information.

· Contact Live Search Support directly. You can use the Live Search Support form to send us your feedback. Select option Other from the form’s drop-down list and complete the rest of the form. Include as much detail as you can in the comments box on specific events, dates, and other information that will assist us in tracking down the details from our side.

Of course they welcome all feedback, not just bot-related issues. Once they have received your feedback, the issue will be investigated and they’ll get back to you as soon as possible. Please allow time for the technical investigation.

Webmaster Center
Live Search Webmaster Center Blog
Webmaster Forums

Check your website for malware: Live Search Webmaster Tools fall update

Kip Kniskern — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 03:27:00 GMT

Our friends at Live Search Webmaster Tools have released a new fall update, which includes some new and improved tools for dealing with malware if you’re running a website. According to a blog post today, Live Search finds lots of pages infected with malware as it crawls the web, which it flags as “malware” in Live Search results, and disables the link in order to help protect customers.

Now, as a webmaster you will be able to make use of some of that information to check your own site (LiveSide passed, thanks for checking for us Jeremiah!). From the blog post:

With the updated Crawl Issues tool in Webmaster Center, you will be able to:

Determine whether any malware has been detected on any of your webpages.

Download offline-accessible reports detailing which webpages on your website are affected by the detected malware.

Identify the affected pages quickly and easily.

Read helpful advice in Help on how to fix the problem.

Submit a request, once you have cleaned up the malware, asking the Live Search support team to re-scan your website and remove the malware warning flags from any affected webpages in the Live Search results webpage. Instead of waiting for the next search engine cycle of re-crawling your website, this new, user-requested re-inclusion process should take days, not weeks, to resolve.

With the updated tools in Webmaster Center, if you have any malware issues on either your own pages or on outbound links, you will be able to:

Webmaster Tools has also made it easier to authenticate your site, or especially multiple sites, using only one authentication code, a simpler process. Check out the Webmaster Tools blog for more.

Webmaster Center

Live Search Webmaster Center Out Of Beta + Big Update To Webmaster Tools

Sunshine — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 18:35:00 GMT

The Live Search Webmaster Center, which was launched in beta last year is no longer in beta! And that’s not all! The Webmaster Tools got a big update as well. At the Webmaster Center you will be able to find out more information about how Live Search is crawling and indexing your site.

When you sign into the Live Search Webmaster Center you’ll be able to:

Discover potential issues affecting your site
A new feature to the webmaster Center, the “Crawl Issues” feature helps webmasters to find the following issues:
- File Not Found (404)
- Blocked by REP
- Long Dynamic URLs
- Unsupported Content-Types
For each issue, the URL and the date last found will be displayed
Get more and better backlink data
This tool has been largely improved, giving webmasters access to more data about their referring links. Information about backlinks is useful as they influence the rank of a site. It’s also helpful for web publishers to know what sites link to them since these pages discuss the products/organization and identifying them can be valuable as a means of finding sources of promotion or feedback.
Make the data more actionable
To quickly view the data you need you can make use of Advanced Filtering. You can filter backlinks by top-level domain, subdomain or subfolder. You can even download the data (first 1,000 results) in a CSV file (comma separated values) for quick import into Excel.

The Team also lets us know the following:

When we launch our Webmaster Center we also launched a few resources to help you engage with us. Now more than ever we encourage you to Participate in the Live Search Webmaster community to get help - Our Forum, feedback tool and Webmaster Center blog provides support for web publishers like you, across a broad range of issues, focused on helping you be successful and we are always listening for your feedback.

Give it a go, it won’t hurt to check those reports!

Microsoft launches Live Search Webmaster Portal beta - Try it now

Chris — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 15:34:00 GMT

At Searchification back in September Microsoft demoed a Webmaster portal designed to run side-by-side with the new Live Search, and it is now available in beta. The SEO blogs I've seen posting on this have mentioned that it is a private beta as they received a specific email invite, however for those wanting to try it out I managed to log straight in at http://webmaster.live.com/.

The portal first asks you to setup a profile for the website you want to analyse, which unsurprisingly includes a verification step; you can either upload an xml file or insert a meta tag. The service seems to pick up the meta tag update immediately, which meant we could dive right in.

The summary page is basic but functional, showing when your site was last crawled (or if your site is blocked) and how many pages are included in the Live Search index. For webmasters experiencing problems with a site, this should be your first port of call. The domain rank graphic is a nice touch, though breaking it down into five levels seems insufficient for really being able to gauge performance. For comparison, Google Pagerank goes upto 10, and we're rated 6, how this equates to a Live Search 5/5 we don't know.

Additionally there is a keyword analysis tool, showing how you would perform on Live Search for certain search queries. Again the lack of granularity in the rating system hurts here, to improve your SEO you have to do badly at something! To wrap it all off there is an inbound and outbound link analysis, which if you run a proper website (ie not a blog) will help see where you site is being promoted.

Overall the beta of Live Search Webmaster portal does an ok job, offering nothing stellar if your website is being indexed regularly but offering a good starting location for those having problems.

The latest release of Live Maps also added a new portal for business owners that want to update their listings on the service You can check it out at http://llc.local.live.com.

(via Search Engine Roundtable)