Live Search Webmaster Tools SUPER Beta

And by SUPER Beta I mean it is still SUPER early in the beta cycle. Someone over at Microsoft must have read my previous post about wanting to beta test the new Live Search Webmaster Tools because I received an invite to try them out today via email. As with most Microsoft product betas this tool is a little rough around the edges - and by “a little rough” I really mean a lot rough. You have probably already read the Search Engine Roundtable or WebPro News posts about the initial launch so I won’t go through every feature. They key tools are centered around your sites SERPs on Live.com. You get a top 5 pages, a top 10 list of inbound links and a top 10 list of outbound links along with a keyword strength tool.

The help file wasn’t very helpful in describing the details of the inner workings of these tools but since each tool is only partially functional, partial documentation makes sense. For example searching the Webmaster Help for “domain rank” brings back one listing about geographic hosting locations and how your web server IP affects your rank in a given market and clicking a link under FAQ drops you on the main help page. Although the help content is currently sparse, I did come across this excerpt that I found quite interesting:

Submitting your site doesn’t guarantee that your site will be indexed, but it does help us locate your site so that MSNBot can try to crawl it. MSNBot doesn’t automatically crawl sub-pages on your website. If you want MSNBot to index other pages on your website, submit URLs for those pages.

MSNBot doesn’t crawl sub-pages? How do I have 251 pages from my site in the Live index then? I have a hard time believing their bot doesn’t do anything other than browse the top 150k of each web site’s home page. No worries, eventually they will get the developers to share with the technical writers and these inconsistencies in the documentation will disappear.

Taking a look at the various tools you will find a domain rank bar. The domain rank bar is pretty much all or nothing in it’s current state. Everything with a listing gets 5 green bars, everything with no listing gets a “no data available.” I spent some time searching around on Live trying to discover how Microsoft selected my top 5 pages to no avail. Two of the pages they list as top 5 are not pages I have been actively trying to rank. One of the pages listed is a thumbnail viewer that has very few related keywords and the other is a testimonials page that has a few product names sprinkled through but doesn’t rank well in Live Search for any of the keywords it contains (i.e. gets outranked by other pages on our site in Live Search SERPs that aren’t in my top 5).

I assume the Top Links From tool is basically a linkfromdomain: query because it matches almost identically although not in the same sort order. Along the same lines the Top Links To tool is probably a link: search but I couldn’t test it because despite what many are saying the link: search operator was not functioning for me today. One issue I have with the Top Links To tool is that it displays links from cached results that are eons old and don’t match what I have seen recently when running the link: command against my own site.

The Keywords tool searches your site for keywords you enter and displays the pages that contain those keywords in some form or another. It did a good job harvesting keywords embedded in PDF files on my site and appears to look in all the standard places for keywords even though the Webmaster Help says Microsoft is not a fan of keyword stuff a page unless the keywords are visible to the end user.

Overall this is a good start for Microsoft. The tool will improve and already offers easier ways to check basic site metrics for entry level SEO’s and webmasters.