Webmaster Tools Gets Major Update

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8 commentsWednesday, August 6, 2008

Got Crawl Issues? Live Search Can Help

Webmaster Tools Gets Major Update

8 Comments

By Peter Monroe (WPN reader) - Tue, 09/09/2008 - 19:02

Thanks for the tips,

Thanks for the tips, Jason. As always, a nice article with some solid information.

By greeksteve (WPN reader) - Fri, 08/08/2008 - 09:43

Crawl Problems

Google appears to be 'punishing' my site 'greekvillasforsale.com' as it has'nt crawled it since 12/7/08 would the msn item give me a clue a to Googles' actions ( or inactions)?

Thanks,

greeksteve.

By sajjad (WPN reader) - Thu, 08/07/2008 - 14:04

It's a welcome move

It's a welcome move and should offer some convinience to the web masters.

By Ed Shea (WPN reader) - Thu, 08/07/2008 - 14:03

Webmaster tools does not indicate if your sitemap is uploaded, or valid, or even read. The text on the sitemaps page indicated that you would submit your sitemap each time it changes. I beginning to question the value of publishing sitemap.xml files. Are they being used?

I also see that files that are disallowed in my robots.txt file are being reported as indexed. Other directories that are allowed have zero pages reported as indexed. If the tools are now reporting reliable information what value can they have?

By ThreeMoneyMethods (WPN reader) - Thu, 08/07/2008 - 12:13

Exercise in frustration/fascination

Could be just my computer, but the tool continues to go into click death, taking me to a page telling me that sites which aren't actually down are down or not part of the MSN network... which is exactly the point of what I'm trying to do... let Live Search know that I do in fact own these sites.

So far, in 15 minutes of attempting to use it, I've only been able to get the Auth code for two sites. Seems like I should have been able to do 10 by now.

Not sure what is causing the repeated clicking and taking me to a page which looks like it's logging me out, but MSN, if you're reading this, you might want to consider revising your error page (and the click/reload/click/reload/click/reload method, because I think people will simply leave from that page in frustration, rather than knowing to refresh the page and try again.

I'll wait a few weeks and see if other people complain enough to get the bugs worked out.

If not, I'll assume it's something I'm doing wrong, but hopefully can figure out in the future.

Jonathan
http://www.ThreeMoneyMethods.com

By ThreeMoneyMethods (WPN reader) - Thu, 08/07/2008 - 12:05

Never Mind

After getting code for, and uploading one XML file, I tried to get the XML file for another site.

The MSN tool went into click death again, and logged me out with the following error...

This site may be experiencing a problem
The site may not be a member of the Windows Live Network

You can:

You can sign in or sign up at other sites on the Windows Live Network, or try again later at this site.

Which is sort of funny, since I'm trying to add this site (which isn't down) to the Windows Live network. Refreshing the page, and typing in the exact same web address gives me the XML code I need for my site.

Not sure if it's my site/my computer/my MSN login, but the tool seems buggy to me.

Jonathan
http://www.ThreeMoneyMethods.com

By Three Money Methods (WPN reader) - Thu, 08/07/2008 - 11:57

Either it doesn't work or I don't get it

I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong, but I signed in to the webmaster tools, and typed in my URL and my XML feed... and it went into a clicking/reloading pattern and then just brought me back to the same screen...

After typing this, I tried it without my XML feed... I didn't understand that it didn't want an actual XML feed, but rather a MSN feed... When I just put in my web address, it gave me the code for adding LiveSearchSiteAuth.xml to my web site(s), so now I'm going to go through the process of adding this to several sites, to see if it helps MSN in any way.

I still find Google's interface much more intuitive, but this is a good improvement for MSN.

Jonathan

By BlueBoden (WPN reader) - Thu, 08/07/2008 - 10:28

backlinks

Google dose not punish websites who is getting links from bad neighborhoods, it wouldn't make sense if they did, because this would obviously be abused by some webmasters.