Microsoft Live launched a webmaster tool (beta) for those who want to check their website stats using Microsoft’s tool. The tool claims to troubleshoot the crawling and indexing of your website, submit sitemaps and view statistics about your websites. But since it is still in beta, some functions are not yet working and there are still a few options to use.
Google has Analytics and Yahoo! has Site Explorer, both are a recommended tools for webmasters. Now Microsoft Live has also entered into the webmaster tool arena for their search engine. I’m really curious about this tool from MS since I’m still optimizing my site in their search engine.
Why Microsoft Live search? Isn’t Google and Yahoo! more popular?
Let’s make my other website, Tambayan.ph, as an example. According to Awstats (provided by my hosting service), my website’s internal statistics are as follows:
(click image to enlarge)
Based on the different referring search engines, Windows Live ranks the 5th. I know that most web surfers use Google as their search engine, while others not new to the web are still loyal to Yahoo! search that’s why most of my traffic comes from those SE’s. While both of them are popular, there are still a large percentage of people who uses Microsoft Live search.
Why?
Because Microsoft is the most used OS in the world, it is almost the default and standard in most Internet Cafe’s and home computers. And guess what is the most used Internet browser? Internet Explorer, which comes with a default search setting using Microsoft Live search.
(click image to enlarge)
When I go to an Internet shop they only have Internet Explorer as their browser, and no Firefox. And when I launch the program the default search is Live search, and sometimes there is a Yahoo! toolbar installed. I don’t see a lot of Google toolbars installed in most computers, and a lot people are lazy to type www.google.com in the address bar of their browser so they just directly type what they are searching for in the search box or address bar. And what results show up from their query? Results coming from MS Live search or Yahoo! search (in case they type on the Yahoo! toolbar).
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a Microsoft advocate, nor do I promote Microsoft Live search. It’s just that this search source is still relevant to your website in terms of traffic. The SERPs on both Google and Yahoo! based on Tambayan.ph is already good, but I still need to optimize it on Live Search. I’m not sure what the problem is but it seems MSN’s robots are not crawling my website properly. So now I turn to this tool…
Live Search Webmaster Center from Microsoft.
It doesn’t have many features yet but on it’s summary page you can see some short details about your site. And as for the robots, my site hasn’t been crawled since November 16, 2007. And four of the top 5 pages links to the old format of my website when I was still using the CMS, e107, which now doesn’t exist. I guess that’s where the problem lies because my site isn’t indexed properly by Live search, their robots still can’t see the new pages I’ve created.
Another noticeable feature is their “Top links to” page summary, which shows tops sites that links to your website. If you notice I get a lot of links from Random Good Stuff (not affiliated with, nor associated with), which I recommend is a really good site to find… err.. random good stuff.
The sitemap ping is not working yet, because I tried to ping my sitemap and it doesn’t work. I just hope they get this fixed soon since I want their bots to crawl my site properly. And that they update their database index with my new (ver. 3) website, and remove the old e107 format (version 2 of my site). They also have a verification tool, much like Yahoo! site explorer, to verify if the site is truly yours.
BTW, you need to login to the site before you can use their tool. You only need to use your existing, if you have one, hotmail or live account. It is still in beta so don’t expect much from it, I just placed my site there hoping that it would be crawled properly by their robots.
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Tags: Google, Microsoft Live, web tools, Yahoo
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