Microsoft Live November Updates

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.