After a brief private beta, the Live Search Webmaster Center aims to help website professionals improve their results in the MSN and Live.com Search Engines.

The launch by Microsoft has been long overdue, with rivals Google and Yahoo! offering more comprehensive webmaster services for months (if not years). Given the delay, Live Search Webmaster Center is relatively underwhelming, offering significantly less functionality than its competitors.

The delay aside, the webmaster center will be a valuable resource for site owners looking to do some basic improvements to their results in MSN and Live search.

Some of the key features included are:

• Date your site was last crawled (or if it’s blocked)
• Details of how many pages are indexed in the Live Search index
• A Live Search Rank for your web pages – 5 point scale (different results to Google’s)
• Inbound and Outbound Link Tools
• A basic keyword analysis tool to determine potential rankings

While the Live Search Webmaster Center provides some helpful information for site owners experiencing organic search issues, for the rest – it lacks a lot of the detail provided by its Google and Yahoo! counterparts.

Apparently Microsoft is currently working on version 2.0, so hopefully more functionality is just around the corner.

To explore the new Live Search Webmaster Portal for yourself, sign in using your Windows Live login details. Then verify your site by uploading an XML file or inserting some special Meta data – and you’re on your way.

If you’ve already signed up and taken it for a spin – tell us what you think by leaving a comment below.

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The first screenshots of the new platform have been released by Barry at Search Engine Roundtable. Along with screenshots, Barry has included basic setup for a domain and what information is available from the portal on the given domain.

Here is what information that is provided by MSN Webmaster Portal:

• Add a website
• Validate a website

When your domain has been added and verified you have access to additional aspects of your domain via Domain Tools. Domain tools offer six different sections about your domain:

1. Summary
2. Profile
3. Keywords
4. Top Links from
5. Top Links to
6. Sitemap

Summary:

This is a basic summary of the website: number of pages in the MSN index, last crawl date, blocked? and a new ranking factor called domain rank. Domain rank appears to go from 1 – 5. Along with this, it also gives the top 5 pages and domain rank of the page, last crawl date and other information.

Profile:

This includes the domain name, location of your xml sitemap, validation type (xml file or meta tag), webmaster email address and way to sign up for a “way cool” monthly email newsletter from MSN.

Keywords:

The keywords tab is actually a tool to find how your website ranks for keywords that you enter. Along with your listing, it also shows your competitors, the domain rank, last crawl date and other information about your organic competition for a given SERP.

Top Links from:

“Among all this website’s outbound links, these 10 are performing the best in Live Search.” Further information about what is meant by “performing the best” for outbound links. Along with the actual links, it gives a rank for each of them.

Top Links to:

“Among all the links to this website, these 10 are performing the best in Live Search.” Further information about what is meant by “performing the best” for inbound links. Like Top Links from, it gives the links and a rank for each of them.

Sitemap:

You can put the location of your sitemap (just like in the summary).

Other things included in the beta is a robots.txt validator and links for help.

There are many more questions that haven’t been answered yet:

What is Domain Rank and what components are included?

Will there be more tools and insight into your domain (as implied by the invitation questionnaire I received)?

Once again, if you would like to see the screenshots for yourself, go over to Search Engine Roundtable and review them for yourself.

UPDATE

Live Search Webmaster Portal Beta

On behalf of the entire Live Search Webmaster Portal Beta team, we are very happy to invite you to be one of the first beta users. We look forward to working with you over the coming months on the Live Search Webmaster Portal Beta program.

Looks like I’m in and that means there will be more regarding MSN Webmaster Portal as soon as I can review it and as long as I can stay in MSN’s Terms of Use.

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We are happy to announce that Project Gatineau, Microsoft’s new, free web analytics service, is ready for beta testing and the first invitations are now being sent to customers.

To manage Project Gatineau’s growth and give customers the best web analytics service possible, the beta is by invitation for US advertisers only for the moment.

All advertisers can request an invitation here: http://advertising.microsoft.com/microsoft-adcenter-gatineau

Project Gatineau’s web analytics are useful to sites of all sizes – from smaller sites that can’t afford an expensive web analytics solution to larger sites looking for a boost in their web analytics capabilities.

So, what’s the big deal?

Microsoft has been promoting the project for some time now, as noted by Tamar at 10e20 back in January, and again in March during a review of low cost analytics:

With Gatineau around the corner (and we can still anticipate its launch), there are other free analytics applications that you should consider using on your site.

David Naylor showed off some screen shots while it was still in Alpha in July that were impressive. But Search Marketing Gurus stole the show with more specifics that will be employed in the new Gatineau.

There are still some very important questions that remain:

1. How will Gatineau be able to pull website owners away from their current analytics packages?
2. What can MSN bring to the table that hasn’t been offered by other analytics services?
3. Will this be added to the Webmaster Portal that was supposed to launch into private beta last month?
   (still unconfirmed that it did launch in limited release)

MSN adCenter Labs has provided some unique tools for marketing and optimization, can this be what we should expect from Gatineau?

Have any of you signed up for the beta? If so, what are your early thoughts?

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Andrew Hoppie, executive producer, MSN APAC, told AgencyFaqs, "India is one of the first markets with a fresh home page. We are creating individual home pages for different markets. We analyse the traffic and make sure we have relevant content."

For instance, the MSN Japan site has an earthquake monitoring module – information useful for the locals. Hoppie adds that the MSN China home page was re-designed in July and has led to a 40 per cent increase in traffic after the change."

"Yes, there is an element of a global identity and there are some standard features, but the key differentiating element is the content."

One of the new features is the the tabloid version for MSN India.

"It has more entertainment content. It’s more like a ‘fun home page. If you look at traditional media, many tabloid editions are coming out. From our understanding of consumers, this is the kind of content they want," said Krishna Prasad, executive producer, MSN India.

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Yahoo Japan Prepares HDTV Portal

The first of these is the speed of the whole project; the launch is due to occur “as early as the current fiscal year,” according to HDTV UK.  Also, “Yahoo aims to acquire one million users per month by the end of 2008.”  If this quick release and early success occur as anticipated, Yahoo would probably be eager to expand the program.

Furthermore, “the company is working with Sharp to jointly develop display technology for large screen televisions that’s compatible with high-definition video.”  An expansion or continuation could also take place here if all goes well.

There are some problems, however.  A minor one: the portal won’t be offering television shows and movies from the get-go; instead, HDTV UK reports, “[t]he portal will initially offer services that provide information using still images and text including maps, restaurant information and rankings of book sales.”  The good stuff will follow later.

But a more serious issue is the “portability” of the system.  Compared to the U.S., Japan enjoys vastly faster and cheaper broadband service.  Until we can catch up, introducing Yahoo’s HDTV portal in America might not make much sense.

“Sina.com, China’s largest portal, has deployed the TeraScale E-Series family of switch/routers to increase the performance of its leading search engine and portal,” according to a press release put out by Force10 Networks.  The upshot: this “enables Sina to seamlessly scale its portal as its more than 100 million registered subscriber base expands.”

That sounds nice for Sina.  And as you may remember, Sina has ties to Google China.  So although the development is by no means a direct victory for Google, it’s still a win in a sort of friendly-onlooker way.  (It also works in an enemy-of-my-enemy sense – Baidu stands against both Sina and Google.)

Unfortunately for Sina (and perhaps for Google), its new system will not receive the lion’s share of traffic related to the 2008 Olympics.  Gu Wen of the China Daily reports that, after a protracted battle, “Olympic organizers . . . have confirmed Sohu’s marketing rights as an Olympic sponsor, such as its eligibility to use the Olympic logo, while promising crackdowns on ‘ambush marketing,’ which occurs when a company tries to establish or imply an association with the Games without paying any royalties.”

Well, you win some, you lose some.  Or as Google’s been forced to do in this market, you sometimes sit on the sidelines.

AOL.it offers Italian users an online destination, which brings together a variety of content, interactive services and safety features. It offers email with an unlimited storage option and spam protection, along with instant messaging, and social networking applications Including AOL Foto and AOL Video.

"Dana Dunne, Chief Executive Officer of AOL Europe said: "We’re very pleased to be launching AOL.it. Italy is a rapidly growing online market, with high broadband penetration and huge opportunities for online advertising."

"Launching a dedicated portal here will help us compete for both users and advertisers. AOL has the heritage, the infrastructure and the scale to offer Italy a strong local portal that meets the needs of online users."

AOL currently has portals in the UK, Germany, Netherlands, France and Austria. The company plans to launch local portals in 14 different international countries over the next 18 months, a number of which will be in Europe.

Dunne continued: "Europe is one of the key engines of growth for AOL. This market is growing faster than the US with online advertising spending in Western Europe forecast to grow by 25% per year until 2009."

"By launching dedicated portals that have real appeal in local markets, we are well placed to take advantage of this opportunity. We expect to cover over 95% of the Europe online market within 18 months."

Will Neuf Cegetel’s customers be as won over by this AOL content as Anton Ego was by Remy’s ratatouille? AOL France thinks so, and AOL Europe CEO Dana Dunne offered that a “unique range of highly engaging content and on-line applications” will interest those users.

“By managing the Neuf Cegetel portals, AOL reinforces the power of its regular audience of over two million broadband homes. AOL can thus reach an audience of 20 million unique visitors/month (Joint audience – 2nd semester 2007 evaluation based on Nielsen NetRatings panel) on the various sites for which it is in charge of advertising (www.aol.fr, co-productions, network of sites managed),” AOL said in a statement.

The value of the agreement comes from the Neuf Cegetel userbase. If AOL can engage them as Neuf Cegetel continues to rollout a DSL service, it enhances the premium of ad placements through the sites AOL supports with content and services on the network.

Just as AOL News embraced whitespace in its recent refurbishment, AOL Video received similar treatment. Video result presentations come back in a grid of 15 blocks, which list the video’s title, source, category, and video length.

User-submitted video that arrives through AOL’s UnCut Video has a place on the updated video site. A small display of thumbnails to recently uploaded videos appears above the ubiquitous branded advertising display on the top right of the main page.

AOL also announced today the availability of a new Windows Vista-ready sidebar gadget which enables consumers to watch popular AOL Video content while using other applications. The skinnable AOL Video Gadget features five channels showcasing 10 of the most recent or most popular videos in each channel.

The gadget can be downloaded from the AOL Developer Network.

Traffic numbers to AOL Video increased greatly from August 2006 to April 2007. A comScore Media Metrix report said unique visitors grew to 8 million per month, while page views rose to 76 million for the period.