Windows Live Search Webmaster Center open to public

Posted on November 16, 2007 at 11:45 am

If you’re a webmaster and you know a little bit about SEO, then you have more than likely created a Google Webmaster Central account and submitted an XML sitemap to the service for better crawling and indexing of your web pages. It’s also a great tool to analyze your robots.txt file, to view your search rankings for keywords, and to see the number of internal and external links to your site.

Yahoo has had a similar tool to help with your web pages being indexed for their search engine called Yahoo Site Explorer, whereby you can submit your web site feed or XML sitemap for better indexing and crawling. They don’t have nearly as many features as Google Webmaster Central, but it’s still better than nothing!

And nothing is what Windows Live search has had for a long time! Until yesterday! The Windows Live Search team has released their own set of webmaster tools called the Live Search Webmaster Center. The tool has moved into public beta and finally gives webmasters the tools necessary to submit XML sitemaps to Windows Live search for better crawling and visibility from the search engine.

Simply sign up with your Windows Live ID and identify your web site either by uploading an XML file or by adding a META tag to your front page. Once you’re logged in, you can access your web site profile and gain other valuable information that could never be seen before, such as your domain rank, your top ranking pages and how many pages are in the index.

Windows Live Search Webmaster Center Summary

The Summary page gives you your domain rank along with the top 5 performing pages that show up the most in Windows Live Search results. The Keywords page allows you to see which pages perform the best for specific keywords:

The Top links from and Top links to sections both show the top performing pages that either link to your or that you link to from your web site. Finally, click on Sitemap to go ahead and submit your sitemap to Live Search.

As of right now, there are not any other features to the service, but it’s definitely a great jump forward for Windows Live Search! Hopefully, people can start getting more traffic from MSN and Yahoo, instead of mostly from Google! I still don’t understand why Yahoo and MSN combined only produce like 10 to 15% of my traffic! Source Live Search Blog

Technorati Tags: windows live search, live search webmaster center, webmaster tools, xml sitemap