Microsoft Launches Live Search Webmaster Tools Beta While Developing Version Two

The long expected webmaster support area from Microsoft has arrived. Microsoft Live Search has launched Live Search Webmaster Center and a new “Webmaster Tools” beta as part of the support services.

I had posted detailed screen captures of the tools several days before the public beta was announced. Now that people have access to this tools, they are asking questions. What do the green “rank” bars represent exactly? Why are the features so limiting? Are they coming out with more features soon?

Rand at SEOmoz interviewed Eytan Seidman of the Live Search team. In his interview, Rand said:

I’ll be visiting the Live team over in Redmond to look at version 2 of the Live Webmaster Portal.

Wow, very exciting news. So version two is in the works. I hope it adds tons of features, because there is a lot of catch up work Microsoft needs to do to be on par with Google or Yahoo’s tools.

One other interesting tidbit from Rand’s interview with Eytan was Eytan saying:

One thing that we noticed for example while mining our logs is that there are still a fair number of sites that specifically only allow Googlebot and do not allow MSNBot.