Friday, December 21, 2007

MSN Launches Live Search Webmaster Center

MSN launched their reply to Google Webmaster Central recently. It's called Live Search Webmaster Center, and can be found at: http://webmaster.live.com/

To log in, We'll need a Windows Live ID. An MSN Hotmail, MSN Messenger, or Passport account will also work.

The interface is still simple and somewhat limited as compared to Google, but it does provide some useful data. It's also still in beta release and should continue to add features as development progresses. Here's a screenshot of the current interface.

Similar to its Google counterpart, Windows Webmaster Center allows us to submit and manage our XML sitemap, as well as we can test robots.txt file, analyze our top inbound and outbound links, and view our rankings in Windows Live Search etc.

For security reasons, we must prove that we own your site by either adding a special Meta tag to our homepage or by uploading a XML file to our site’s root directory. MSN walks you through the easy steps of completing this task.

Currently, the quality of our keyword rankings and inbound and outbound links are displayed by a set of green boxes under the column Rank. So far, we have seen a single page or keyword rank varies in 5 boxes.