I think this is the best place to put this on:
FYI, in case any1 is interested
Shortly after that day in March when we had to take the “link:†operator offline, a small team was formed in Redmond. Its singular focus: to build the next-generation set of tools, content and resources for SEO professionals and webmasters (and get “link:†back in your hands). Creatively named Webmaster Portal (we’re really good at marketing), it will be a single, friendly place to find all tools and information relating to Live Search SEO. Initially we’ll support these scenarios:
Troubleshooting tools to ensure MSNBot is effectively crawling and indexing your site
Sitemap creation, submission and ping tools
Statistics about your website
Consolidation of content submission resources
New content and community resources
While we expect the tools to be available publicly in late Fall, we still have some polishing to do. In the meantime we’ve created a private beta program to let adventuresome folks get their hands on the tools sooner – and help polish things by providing feedback. If you’re interested in participating in the beta program over the next few months, please send a mail to lswmp@microsoft.com to apply!
– Nathan Buggia, Sr. Product Manager - Webmaster & Developer
– Ryan Burkhardt, Group Program Manager - Webmaster & Developer
Interesting
Funny thing about MSN search - we place great - average position for most of our bread and butter keywords is better than google, but it just doesn’t get used that much (at least not by our key audience - I guess tech-type people seem to flock to Google a helluva lot more than MSN)
But every little bit helps… so good to know!