Marketing Pilgrim

Remember back in March when MSN/Live took their link: operator offline? Well, they’re now one step closer to opening up that information. This evening, they’ve announced a new private beta of their Webmaster Portal. The portal will be designed to be “a single, friendly place to find all tools and information relating to Live Search SEO.”

Their initial support will cover:

• Troubleshooting tools to ensure MSNBot is effectively crawling and indexing your site
• Sitemap creation, submission and ping tools
• Statistics about your website
• Consolidation of content submission resources
• New content and community resources

Slated to be available to the public this fall, the Live Search blog has opened up the private beta. Email lswmp@microsoft.com if you’re interested in providing feedback on Microsoft’s answer to Webmaster Central and Site Explorer!

This is a promising sign that MSN/Live is really beginning to take search seriously: communicating with the SEO community is, I think, a step in the right direction. By communicating with the people who not only try to position sites in the index, but also communicate to their clients why targeting MSN/Live search is still important, Live has its own free word-of-mouth campaign.

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