Shortly after that day in March when we had to take the “link:” operator offline, a small team was formed in Redmond. Its singular focus: to build the next-generation set of tools, content and resources for SEO professionals and webmasters (and get “link:” back in your hands). Creatively named Webmaster Portal (we’re really good at marketing), it will be a single, friendly place to find all tools and information relating to Live Search SEO. Initially we’ll support these scenarios:

  • Troubleshooting tools to ensure MSNBot is effectively crawling and indexing your site
  • Sitemap creation, submission and ping tools
  • Statistics about your website
  • Consolidation of content submission resources
  • New content and community resources

While we expect the tools to be available publicly in late Fall, we still have some polishing to do.  In the meantime we’ve created a private beta program to let adventuresome folks get their hands on the tools sooner – and help polish things by providing feedback. If you’re interested in participating in the beta program over the next few months, please send a mail to lswmp@microsoft.com to apply!

-- Nathan Buggia, Sr. Product Manager - Webmaster & Developer
-- Ryan Burkhardt, Group Program Manager - Webmaster & Developer