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By Rene LeMerle
Building on from the significant update in August, Microsoft has just released a new round of enhancements and fixes to the Live Search Webmaster Center.
Live Search Webmaster Center is Microsoft’s suite of tools that allow site owners to troubleshoot the crawling and indexing of their site, submit and manage sitemaps and view various site statistics. In essence, it’s a less mature version of Google’s Webmaster Tools.
This latest Live Search Webmaster Center enhancement is heavily focused on Malware management and the improvements cover the following 3 areas:
1. Fix Issues On Your Site
The webmaster center now highlights any web pages that have been identified as hosts of malware, with offline reports available to address the issues.
2. Protect Your Customers
The August release saw the introduction of a basic outbound link management tool. Now site owners can use the tool to identify any outbound links that point to pages that contain malware and present a risk to customers or site visitors.
3. Easier Authentication
For multi site owners, the new authentication process means they only have to “use one authentication code for all your sites. In addition, site owners no longer need to specify between XML or HTML authentication methods. Simply choose one and crawler will automatically check for both.
While it’s encouraging that Microsoft has taken some important steps to help site owners maintain a “malware free” internet, the reality is that the update was fairly underwhelming.
Given the gaps between the Live Search Webmaster Center tools and the equivalent Google and Yahoo! tools, it begs the question “was it Microsoft development time well spent?”…I’ll let you be the judge.
Rene LeMerle is the VP of Marketing at ineedhits.com, a leading provider of results driven Search Engine Marketing services.
