MSN Webmaster Portal was announced in August and was to be released into beta in September and be fully accessible by the end of November, however very little has been released since the initial announcement. Until now.
The first screenshots of the new platform have been released by Barry at Search Engine Roundtable. Along with screenshots, Barry has included basic setup for a domain and what information is available from the portal on the given domain.
Here is what information that is provided by MSN Webmaster Portal:
- Add a website
- Validate a website
When your domain has been added and verified you have access to additional aspects of your domain via Domain Tools. Domain tools offer six different sections about your domain:
- Summary
- Profile
- Keywords
- Top Links from
- Top Links to
- Sitemap
Summary:
This is a basic summary of the website: number of pages in the MSN index, last crawl date, blocked? and a new ranking factor called domain rank. Domain rank appears to go from 1 – 5. Along with this, it also gives the top 5 pages and domain rank of the page, last crawl date and other information.
Profile:
This includes the domain name, location of your xml sitemap, validation type (xml file or meta tag), webmaster email address and way to sign up for a “way cool” monthly email newsletter from MSN.
Keywords:
The keywords tab is actually a tool to find how your website ranks for keywords that you enter. Along with your listing, it also shows your competitors, the domain rank, last crawl date and other information about your organic competition for a given SERP.
Top Links from:
“Among all this website’s outbound links, these 10 are performing the best in Live Search.” Further information about what is meant by “performing the best” for outbound links. Along with the actual links, it gives a rank for each of them.
Top Links to:
“Among all the links to this website, these 10 are performing the best in Live Search.” Further information about what is meant by “performing the best” for inbound links. Like Top Links from, it gives the links and a rank for each of them.
Sitemap:
You can put the location of your sitemap (just like in the summary).
Other things included in the beta is a robots.txt validator and links for help.
There are many more questions that haven’t been answered yet:
What is Domain Rank and what components are included?
Will there be more tools and insight into your domain (as implied by the invitation questionnaire I received)?
Once again, if you would like to see the screenshots for yourself, go over to Search Engine Roundtable and review them for yourself.
UPDATE
Live Search Webmaster Portal Beta
On behalf of the entire Live Search Webmaster Portal Beta team, we are very happy to invite you to be one of the first beta users. We look forward to working with you over the coming months on the Live Search Webmaster Portal Beta program.
Looks like I’m in and that means there will be more regarding MSN Webmaster Portal as soon as I can review it and as long as I can stay in MSN’s Terms of Use.
