Update to Live Search Webmaster Tools

Microsoft made some significant updates to its Webmaster Tools which will provide webmasters with information on how their sites are being crawled and indexed.

Those that use the Live Search Webmaster tools will be able to find four types of issues, including 404 errrors (File Not Found), Blocked by REP, Long Dynamic URL, and identify unsupported content types. For each issue, the URL and the data encountered is returned.

Users of the solution will also be able to get more and better backlink data, something Google Webmaster Central users have had for quite a long time and which keeps getting better.

Microsoft Webmaster Tools is also making data more "actionable" with advanced filtering (for example, filter backlinks by domain, subdomain or subfolder) and data downloads (option to download the first 1,000 results in a CSV file) which can be imported into Excel or a custom reporting tool to assit in the analysis of results.

Kudos to the Live Search Webmaster Tools team. I know many SEO's that have been clamoring for more data from Microsoft for a long time and these enhancements show that they've listened by returning a better, much deeper solution. While it's not yet at the level of Google Webmaster Central, it's surpassed Yahoo Site Explorer in functionality and ease of use.