Microsoft was the last of the big three search engines to provide webmasters with a special resource where they could submit their site and browse information about the site crawl and search statistics that are not available to the general public.
One would expect that after taking so long to offer a resource for webmasters, the Live Search Webmaster Center would provide some snazzy tools and give a lot of good information that would justify its late arrival. Unfortunately, this is not the case.
Live Search was officially released from closed beta on the 15th of November. This was accompanied by the creation of the Live Search Webmaster Center blog, where the Program Manager admitted, “We know we have a lot of work still to do and we would like to get your feedback on the tools as well as suggestions for future tools.”
Ironically, the first thing many webmasters noticed was that the feedback form did not work well. Frustratingly, what a large number of webmaster also noticed was that the tool was flawed.
Live Search Webmaster Tools currently has trouble accepting a number of websites. No official comment has been received about the reason behind this error or what is even causing it. A large number of webmasters who tried to add their sites were greeted with an error that says “Sorry, something went wrong. Please try again.”
For sites that are successfully added, the statistics provided are mostly regular fare: last crawl date, top 5 pages, keyword ranking, robots.txt validation, top 10 inbound links and top 10 outbound links. The only unique thing about this tool is the 5-point ranking system it provides for the domain, the top pages and the top links. This system is similar in principle to Google’s PageRank.
