Microsoft Live Search unveiled its Webmaster Center Fall Update today, which includes two new features, one for combating malware, the other to simplify the authentication process.
There’s always chance somebody has hijacked part of a website and added some malicious code (malware). This could also happen to a site your website links to. Being associated with malware is deadly in terms of search rankings (not to mention what it could do to your and/or your visitor’s computer). Live Search automatically flags all pages containing or linking to detected malware with a warning message and disables the link in the search results. 
The second update to Webmaster Central since August, this one upgrades the Crawl Issues tool so that it has the capability to identify any malware associated with a website.
“One of the biggest dangers to searchers on the Web today is a maliciously hijacked website that injects malware onto a user’s computer,” writes Jeremiah Andrick at the Live Search Blog.
“Oftentimes, this happens when the site with the malware download is a trusted site. When you link out to other sites you trust, you typically have no way of knowing if those site owners are actually keeping their sites secured and free of malware. As the owner of a site, you want to protect your customers from this kind of malware.”
The Crawl Issues tool can identify affected pages, allow offline reports detailing affected pages, and the updated Outbound Links tool can identify problem links and provide offline reports.
Answering webmaster complaints that authenticating their sites was difficult, especially for large site owners with numerous domains juggling numerous authorization codes. Webmasters can now use one authentication code for all their sites, and no longer need to specify between XML or HTML.
