I noticed today during my monthly link popularity check of my clients’ sites that MSN / Live Search have stopped their link command working again.
Category Archives: Live search
Live Search Webmaster Center goes Live!
Microsoft has opened up it’s Live Search Webmaster Center as a public beta. Unfortunately and predictably you need a Windows Live account to sign in. Once in however the interface is simple, straightforward and looks easy to use, but unfortunately it doesn’t seem to work. Upon adding a site for the first time you receive the ever-so-helpful error message “Sorry, something went wrong” and an authentication error. However you can’t authenticate your site without first adding your site, which doesn’t work.
Microsoft’s Live Search link command lives again!
Live search has re-enabled it’s link function after many, many months and this time it has a slightly different syntax. A search for “+linkdomain:www.denialdesign.com” returns a linkdomain result and a search for “+link:www.denialdesign.com/link-popularity.asp” returns the results for the number of links to a particular page. I’ve updated the Denial Design free link popularity check tool to match. A word of warning however, Live Search does seem to give different results for the same search. The first time I checked denialdesign.com had 109 back links and the second time a few minutes later it had 116, so it seems the function returns a rough result only or the number of links on the particular datacentre your query reaches.
Microsoft’s Live Search Webmaster Portal revealed!
Rustybrick over at SEO Roundtable has posted some screen shots and details of Microsoft’s version of Google Webmaster tools. It seems all the basics are there and there’s even a scoring system or “domain rank” and a top 5 pages list. Only your top 10 backlinks are shown however but overall it looks like a similar range of tools to Google’s webmaster tools and much more comprehensive and easier to use that Yahoo’s Site Explorer.
MSN Live Search stops advanced operator queries
Windows Live Search (MSN as was) have blocked all advanced operator queries such as link:www.yourdomain.com in an effort to prevent data mining. Read the official line here. They hope to restore these functions at a later date once they figure out how to stop the data mining.