UPDATE: Sorry for getting this up so late in the day, gang. There were some technical issues with getting the video uploaded in a timely manner. -Scott
What a day! It's our first Whiteboard Friday interview from our new Whiteboard Studios at Mozplex 2.0 (or the Mozoleum as our guest suggests). Who do we have? None other than our good friend and MSN Live Webmaster Center honcho, Nathan Buggia.
As many of you know, Live just released a whole bunch of cool new features for Webmaster Center. Nathan and Rand discuss how these features can help webmasters, a tease of some things we can expect from Live WMC in the future, and a little bit of the how and why of what makes Live tick. Nathan also offers up his feelings on the blogging-about-black-hat subject that's been coming up lately: He makes some very compelling arguments about why dissemination of black (or even gray) hat tactics can be troubling for both the engines and webmasters.
This interview is a bit lengthy (~20 minutes) but it's full of good stuff and definitely worth viewing.
SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Live's New Webmaster Tools & More with Nathan Buggia from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.
And because Rand is so diligent about providing you, dear Readers, with lots of cool information, here's a bunch of useful stuff he wanted to include because he loves you.
A Look at Some of Live Webmaster Tools' Latest Features:
I do want to add to Scott's impression that there is really worthwhile material in the interview. Nathan is far more open than some of his search engine representative counterparts and it makes for a really valuable, informational chat. I know 20 minutes is a long time to invest; hopefully you can find some time over the weekend.
As Scott said, here's a rundown of some of the features Live's now offering in their Webmaster Tools.
The concept of a "domain score" is fascinating. As SEOs, we've long suspected that the engines didn't just use page-level metrics, but domain-level metrics as well, and this is one of the first public confirmations we've seen of that nature (though, as I noted to Danny during our talk on WM Radio last week, plenty of Googlers have suggested the idea that certain domains carry more authority and importance than others, too).
Above is the standard list of links Live shows. You can download the first thousand in CSV format, and while they're not ordered by "importance" per se, they do tend to show more important links before less important ones (much like Yahoo! Site Explorer).
This is where the really cool features start. Just as you can do a command like linkdomain:seomoz.org site:.gov at Yahoo!, you can now filter your links by subdomain, domain or subfolder in Live's Webmaster Tools.
You can use the same spiffy filters on outbound links - for which Live is currently the only source of information (and also provides some data on this via their linkfromdomain command in the engine).
Overall, I'm impressed with the new offerings - with this release, I suspect Live is moving towards a more "essential" toolset for search marketers, and I hope that, as Nathan noted, it continues to drive the engine to improve its performance and its market share.
I have looked at Live's Webmaster Tools in the past and wondered why I wasted my time to sign up to something that gave virtually no information.
However, you just redeemed yourself, as this looks to be far more useful than before, and it comes at a time when Google Webmaster Tools is exhibiting a lot of strange glitches in the results and reports.
Oh and Fisrt Psot!!!111!!!!
MSN catches a lot of criticism that it doesn't deserve along with a lot that it does. Harsh though it may sound, the fact that they're so far behind Google with their webmaster tools falls in the latter category.
To me, there's nothing particularly exciting about a copy of technology that Google's had in place for years. If Mr. Balmer is really serious about competing, the new Live webmaster tools updates aren't just long overdue; they're a far cry from the innovation MSN needs to be demonstrating.
MSN talks a big game about leading in search, but I don't see it happening if they keep lagging behind like this.
I semi agree with you.
But I think you aren't truly seeing the value in the new tools released. Although there are similar tools already in place at Google, any tools MSN releases are just as value even if it is several years after Google released theres.
Why?
Well MSN's reports on their Search Engine. Googles reports on Google's search engine. There fore each tool in a way is just as valuable as it's counterpart at google.
If the tools reported on the same set of data as Googles, then indeed what MSN is up to is piss poor.
These steps are in right direction but the core issues with MSN indexing and search performance are still a problem though.
Still pretty underwhelming.
I second what you say about Page Score - it's showing up pages and domains as 5 that I KNOW are pretty piss-poor and only deserve a 1. Until they sort that out Page Score is not going to be a useful metric.
But even if they did get this fixed, it'll only ever be a wannabe toolbar PageRank toolbar, and that's not exactly an accurate metric. I appreciate this effort of MSN to improve their services for webmasters and SEOs, but they need to come out with something truly innovative/useful compared to what Google/Yahoo offer, if they really want to get some respect.
Yeah. Live was extremely underwhelming before this--especially compared to the features in Excel 2007. We know Microsoft has the goods, it's just a matter of dialing them in.
I think Microsoft is moving in the right direction.
One problem that I have found with these tools, is that requests from whatever they use to verify the account, by fetching the XML ID file, get caught by my bad-bot trap and the account then can't be verified.
I've been keeping an eye and Live Webmaster Tools for a while and I appreciate their new tools. Google Webmaster Tools takes way too long before updating stuff so Microsoft is offering an nice alternative. I am just wondering about their page and domain scores. It doesn't seem to be very accurate right now.
Nice stuff, I did not know you have very good sense of humour Rand, nicely surprised :)
So has anyone ever noticed that the Live Search Webmaster Center Blog uses Feedburner to handle the RSS? Do I even need to mention that Feedburner is owned and run by Google... hmmmm...
if some of this tools could provide anchor text of backlinks that will be wary helpful
I'm still not convinced about the usefulness of Live's Webmaster Tools, much less the crawling ability of msnbot.
I've had a 301 in place for over 2 years, but live can not pick it up for whatever reason, and their new header status check tool shows my domian coming back as a 200, when it should report a 301 (I've checked on other checking sites and its fine, plus I can browse and see it forwards just fine)
I do like the backlinks report though.
Are they directly reporting the "requested URL" status or are they following the redirect and then reporting the "final URL" status?
Set up a 301 redirect to a URL that returns the HTTP status code of "404 Not Found" and test what they report for that situation...
err, um, they are reporting the request url status, and it appears to be working on the requested URL. Apparently youfoundjake had a pebkac error.
Oops, sorry, but the root still shows up in their index without the www.
heeh
*** pbkac ***
Ooops!
LOL
I haven't used Live's Webmaster tools so far, because their search engine plays virtually no role in the German market and I am somehow reluctant to use Microsoft services. But this looks really interesting, so maybe I change my mind and give it a try.
rand, you were right about this one. nathan might be the most interesting search engineer i have seen in an interview to date. i was thrilled by how practical and honest this conversation took place between you guys, and i'm sure there's no way to capture the same candor in just a blog post.
I am happy they are finally improving on it. I still would like to see them do what google does and keep refreshing the sitemaps we supply automatically. What's the sense in even putting it in when we have to ping them or hit a resumbit button.
Just signup up. Looks pretty good. I love how my top five pages and domain all have full green bars. I must rock harder than I thought. :)
I think the number of inbound links is also a wee bit off.
Other than that, I'm stoked to dive in and take advantage of it.
Cheers!
@trontastic
I signed up on the release date and messed with it a bit, I really like it so far, it's good to have another source to analyze you web sites.
Thanks for the screen shots and your take on it. Great video too, BTW.
Long overdue, but much appreciated none-the-less.
When Live Webmaster Center first launched, I was thrilled ... until I logged in, and then felt that there wasn't much to get excited about or do anything with. I held out hope that something more was on its way, and while I don't think we are there yet, I think the team deserves huge kudos for this.
Yes, they are standing in Google's shadow and has been since launch. On top of that, after the link: and linkdomain: queries went away, then resurfaced for a short period as +linkdomain: then (finally) disappeared, it's been hard to get excited about getting anything useful from MSN/Live.
I've long felt that if any link information would be available again, it would come from within Webmaster Center. While I wish/hope that more public information will again be available, seeing it return here is great news. And the filtering is a great addition that hopefully makes the other engines....you know how you are....stand up and say, "Hmm, that's pretty cool, we should add that."
I hope that more attention is given to the Page Score feature though. With the few sites and examples I've looked at, there still seems to be a lot of room for improvement here. Right now it just seems that way too many pages show green boxes all the way.
I applaud the notion of "giving actionable information," and hope that continues, but in this case, where nearly every link/page maxes out the scale, where everyone is a winner, just doesn't feel all that useful...kind of like a game where no one loses and everyone gets to take home a trophy.
Tighten it up, be harsh if you have to -- that's actionable.
Looking forward to how Webmaster Center matures either way.
Page Score, Domain Score, Static Rank... all very confusing. And Page Score and Domain Score just isn't working right now on Live Webmaster Center because all the pages on my site have 5 bars and the Domain Score is 5 bars also...
Just signed up with LWT(Live Webmasters Tool).
It seems lots of issues to rectified, the first thing I have noticed in the summary page, Region. Where we can't set prefered location/ market.
However in Google We have an option to Set Geographic Region, which is really a good tool for SEO. In Live webmasters forum they are asking to change the Host to target the right market. Is ther any alternative solution?
Aj