Live/MSN Search does have a Webmaster Center, and on November 12, 2007 they released Webmaster Tools.  It’s still in Beta, so there are some bugs to be worked out.  Live Search may have bugs?  Ok, I won’t get into that here!

First, you need to gain access to Live’s Webmaster tools.  If you do not have a Live ID, click hereand signup for one.  Once you have a Live ID, go to Live Search Webmaster Center and sign in.

After you are signed in Live Webmaster Tools, click the grey add a site button.  Now you must enter your absolute site URL and the absolute URL of your Sitemap.  You will also need to enter a Webmaster E-mail contact address for the site.  Now that you have entered the information requested by Live, make sure you choose which verification method you will use.  I always use the XML file, because I do not like to clutter my code with unneeded Meta tags.  Now, click the grey submit button.

Live Search makes verification a little harder then it has to be.  Regardless, you must create a file named “LiveSearchSiteAuth.xml”and enter the appropriate authentication file contents.  Once you have completed this process, click the grey ok button.

Live Search provides very little data in their Webmaster Tools area.  Therefore, confirming that your Sitemap submission was successful is impossible at the time of writing.

You should keep the verification file or Meta tag active for as long as you operate your site.  If Live/MSN Search is unable to verify your site in the future, you will need to complete this process again.

Since the Live/MSN bot is so slow to visit new sites, I also recommend using their basic URL submission form as well.  It can be found here.  This seems to help in getting indexed quicker in Live/MSN.

Now that you finished submitting your Sitemap to the top three search engines, let’s move on to a few quick links that will help your site get indexed faster.

Quick Launch Index Guide Home

Tags: Live/MSN Search Sitemaps

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 12th, 2008 at 1:22 am and is filed under Quick Launch Index Guide. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.