A summary of the recent updates at Microsoft Live for this month:
• Updated Compression – Takes the load off of your server which is a good thing. They were beginning to fall into the category of “Ask Jeeves” where they kill your server with spidering, but give little traffic.
• If-Modified-Since Feature
• Standardization of REP rules (Robots Exclusion Protocol) – time will tell if Live always obeys robots.txt.
• Sitemaps can be placed anywhere, not just in the root folder – this will be a great benefit to webmasters of large sites
• “Significant” increase in crawling capabilities – this will be a “wait and see approach”
• Webmaster Tools – They are starting to look as good as Google in this area.
• Filtering of webmaster reports – Exactly what are they filtering for? No specifics given.
• Malware tool – Finally.
• Request of a recrawl – If this works, it would be very cool.
• Excel keyword research for adCenter – This tool is already great, but because Google upgraded their free keyword research tool, it makes using this not so sexy.
• Web error toolkit to fix 404 pages – this has been asked to be included for awhile.
• New launch with Live Search API – will backlinks be allowed to be searched again?
In all, we’re VERY happy to see the changes that Microsoft is making with their search portal. I can finally say with confidence, Microsoft is serious about search.
The main reason I started the SEO Revolution was out of frustration. Frustration at all of the lies and misconceptions that are posted in forums, given as advice in teleconferences, and even taught in live workshops. "So why didn't all of this work?" " Why wasn't my site successful?" " Why am I still stuck in a rut?" 