Live Search Webmaster Center Update

Do you worry about search engines not being able to crawl your site properly ? Does your site have a penalty ? Who’s linking to your site and are there any patterns in linkage occurring to the competitors website?

Well, the answer could be here:

Webmaster Tools

Much excitement has come from the Live Search Webmaster team in the last week as it prepared for the first major update to its webmaster tools since last November. The update includes many new features that will allow webmasters to glean more information about how Live Search is crawling and indexing sites. Available data on crawls and indexing will be much increased via the “crawl issues” feature set.

Microsoft is keen on securing its relationship with web publishers, so keen in fact the information webmaster live provides is bound to point you in the right direction in improving your website traffic.

Major factors that could seriously effect Live seeing your website are covered: 404 - not found errors, Blocked by Rep where URLS are listed that Live search has found but are being blocked from indexing. (robots.txt) Webmaster Center will report on URLS which are too long and should be shortened to avoid infinite loops in crawling. Content types can be monitored too, making sure that website pages are valid and in-turn can be indexed appropriately.

My personal favourite of the webmaster center update is how extensive the Back-link Data information is . Information about back-links is always welcome to the SEO. Reports are now easily generated on links to a website with the addition of filtering functionality where back-links can easily be seen from specific domains or sub-domains. Ideal for checking out competitors links too!

TLD back-link listing is equally extensive enabling checks on linkage received which is particularly useful with website localisation now very much in focus. The data set that webmaster center delivers is more than manageable with advanced export functions to excel and filtering that will avoid getting lost in the data itself when your doing offline analysis. This will make analysis of a website much easier with the added bonus of functionality to quickly filter results from two sub-domains or two sub folders. Such custom data can then easily be shared.