Earlier this year I participated in an online focus group where questions were asked about various webmaster and SEO tools. The session was run by a third party and I was able to get them to admit it was for Microsoft. Tonight, like many others that showed interest, I received an invite to register from Nathan Buggia, Sr. Product Manager of the Live Search Webmaster Tools Team.
Similar to Google’s Webmaster Tools (Vanessa Fox interview here) and Yahoo’s Site Explorer tools (Tim Mayer interview here), the services included in this Beta of Microsoft’s Windows Live Webmaster Portal appear to be split up into three categories:
Troubleshooting
- Site crawling
- Site Indexing
- Robots.txt
- Sitemaps
Sitemaps
- Creation
- Submission (upload, autodiscovery)
- Ping
Stats
- Top search terms for your domain
- Top search terms for other domains
- Top keywords on your site
- Inbound links to your site
- Inbound links to other sites
- Outbound links from your site
- Outbound links from other sites
- Perceived site quality score
- Number of pages indexed
Search Engine Land has a blog post with more info as does the Live Search Weblog from Aug 22.
At the end of the registration form, there’s an interesting question:
“Are you willing to do public relations tasks to promote your Technology Adoption Program, such as press releases, press conversations, launch events, public website case studies and videos?”
I don’t know if everyone sees that or just the initial beta testers.
Based on how well the tools work, they might be a useful alternative or redundancy. However, if they don’t work so great, I doubt too many webmasters will use them since Google and Yahoo tools have been out there and tested for a while.
Since I was registering with Firefox, there were issues after I hit submit so I’ll try again later with MSIE.
