SEO Blog

The Metamend team have just joined the private beta group at the new MSN Live webmaster tools portal. We’re eager to see what MSN will toss our way that will differ in any way from what Google and Yahoo have let us play with up ’til now. In the original portal announcement back in August on the LiveSearch blog, a specific feature stood out a bit from the rest. “Sitemap Creation, Submission and Ping Tools”. Okay, sitemap submission and ping tools are to be expected, but Sitemap creation? Google passes that one off to the webmasters so that would be a welcome change. Lets see if they deliver.

Live Search obviously has a mountain to climb. Their index has been the brunt of criticism for far a good long time now. So much so that was witness a presenter as SES San Jose in ‘06 refer to their search index irrelevant and ‘who cares’ -ouch. Still, top positioning doesn’t mean that you’ll generate a ton of leads as there just aren’t enough MSN searchers at the moment. Even though IE ships with Live as the ‘default search privider’ it’s clear that it’s time for MSN Search to put up or… well. buy Yahoo! (I love that rumour) Hopefully this new buzz will encourage a few of us to wander back to the MSN for a while in hopes that a meaningful algorithm update is also in the works.