Live Webmaster Tools Overhaul

We don’t usually focus on Microsoft Live Search as Yahoo and Google have a dominant share of search engine traffic (see the graph below). Yahoo and Google hold approximately 90% of all search engine traffic. Microsoft has a mere 5%.

Despite these figures we still like to keep up-to-date with the latest Live Search news to see how Microsoft is trying to gain more of a foothold on the traffic. Microsoft has just released a new version of their Webmaster Tools which move them towards the standards of the already established Google and Yahoo webmaster tools.

Webmaster tools allow you to submit your website to the search engines, provide them with the locations of your sitemaps and learn about what problems the search engines face when crawling your website.

The new Live Webmaster Tools comes with several nice features. The backlinks and outbound links come with a Page Score (from zero to five) which represents the power/quality of the link, this can prove useful for SEO. Additionally the crawl issues tab includes much more detail about problems the spider has encountered when indexing the website.

However, the interface is not very pleasing on the eye, nor is it very user-friendly. These tools also lack some basic features Google has had implemented quite a while ago such as automatically retrieving the robots.txt file to check it (in the Live Webmaster Tools you have to copy and paste).

Overall the new Live Webmaster Tools are an improvement on the previous version, however it needs a lot more work to match the standard set by both Google and Yahoo.