Big Update to Webmaster Tools

Creating websites and publishing on the web is getting simpler and simpler all the time, but with more content on the web it is becoming harder for webmasters and publishers to ensure that their content can be found. Last fall when we launched the Live Search Webmaster Center in beta, the goal was to establish a long term relationship with webmasters and help them achieve their goals by addressing the most common questions we hear, and help them understand how Live Search sees their site.

In an effort to improve upon those goals, today we have launched a significant update to our Webmaster Center and brought the Center out of Beta! This update includes several new features that provide webmasters more information about how Live Search is crawling and indexing their sites, as well as a few features to make the data more actionable.
When you sign into the Live Search Webmaster Center You be able to:

Discover potential issues affecting your site

A new feature to the webmaster Center, the “Crawl Issues” feature will allow webmasters to be able to find four types of issues we encountered on their sites.

• File Not Found (404)
• Blocked by REP
• Long Dynamic URLs
• Unsupported Content-Types
• Get more and better backlink data

Get more and better backlink data

In the beta of the Live Search Webmaster Center we offered a limited look into backlink data. We’ve significantly enhanced this tool, 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.

Making the data more actionable

Webmasters are analytical and rarely work alone. They often need to be able to grab as much data as they can, and take it offline into Excel or some type of database for analysis and collaboration with a client, marketing or engineering partner. To enable that, we’ve built a few new features into all our reports, both the new ones and the old ones.

1. Advanced Filtering – This way they can quickly scope the results to zoom into the data they need, without having to sift through all the results.

2. Downloading Data – For times when webmasters want to view a lot of results, we also provide a download option that can give access to the first 1,000 results in a CSV file (comma separated values) that can be easily opened with Microsoft Excel or imported into a custom reporting tool. This can help a webmaster analyze the results and share them with colleagues.

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