Exploring MSN’s New Webmaster Tools
Live Search keeps improving all the time
MSN has recently upgraded their Webmaster Center to provide additional tools. Previously they provided basically no information but now they provide some excellent tools and some great nuggets of information. We will look at them in this article.
Websites Overview
Overview of Live Webmaster Center
The first page you arrive at will list all the websites that you have previously registered. You can see the authentication code that must be present to use your site at Live Webmaster Center. You can also see whether you have verified the site by XML tag or by meta tag.
From this page you can also add a new website by clicking “Add a site.” Click the URL of the site you want to access.
Website Summary
Summary page for your chosen website
The next page gives the summary of all the information that Live has about your website. Some excellent statistics are listed here. You can see when was the last time the Live crawler accessed your website. You can also see how many pages are indexed and whether your website is blocked or not.
Live now lists an interesting metric called “Domain score.” This is how authoratative Live regards your website to be. It is rated from 0 to 5.
Underneath Site Status you can see the top five pages on your website. Presumably these are ordered by Page score. You can see the last time Live accessed each of these pages and whether they are blocked.
Website Profile
Website profile page
On this page you can give Live the address of your website sitemap. You can change how your website is verified. You can also add an email address so that you can be contacted if there are any crawl issues with your website.
Crawl Issues
View crawl issues with your website
On this page you can see any issues that were encountered when Live crawled your website. One of the most useful parts of this section is that you can filter the errors by subdomain or folder. According to Live’s help files filters can only be applied when 1,000 or more errors are found. In practice this doesn’t seem to be the case however.
You can lists pages that were not found (404 errors), pages that were blocked by robots.txt, pages that have long dynamic URLs and unsupported content types. The first 20 results will be listed here but you can download the first 1,000 in csv format.
Backlinks
Website backlink data
The backlink feature lists all the incoming links to your website. Only the first 20 results are displayed, but you can download the first 1,000.
Filtering to get Useful Data
The filtering tools in this section are very useful. First of all you can exclude all internal links. Type in your website domain into the filter box. Check the filter radio button and choose the “Exclude” option. This will now list all the external links to your website.
You can also filter the results by tld. For example you can list list all the .edu domains that link to your website. Check the filter radio button and type “.edu” into the filter box. Choose to “include” this extension.
Outbound Links
View outbound link data
This page lists all the websites that your site links to. As before only 20 pages are listed but you can download 1,000. These results can be filtered in the same way that the backlink data can.
Keywords Tool
View keyword performance
This is a mysterious tool that shows in which order pages are returned for a certain search term. The results do not give any indication at which number the pages appear in the search results, just in which order pages from your site are returned. The page score and last crawled date are also returned for each page. For the time being the real usefulness of this page is questionable.
After the lastest update, Live Webmaster Tools certainly is much more useful. It need some improvement, particularly in the keywords search section. The algorithm to determine page score also needs tweaking. Too many pages are being returned with page score five. Overall though, an excellent improvement.
Related Articles
Tags: More Recent Articles
Stock photography from stock.xchng
Discussion
No comments for “Exploring MSN’s New Webmaster Tools”
Post a comment