Microsoft will launch a new Webmaster Portal

[*Anjali*]

From the live search blog:

Shortly after that day in March when we had to take the “link:” operator offline, a small team was formed in Redmond. Its singular focus: to build the next-generation set of tools, content and resources for SEO professionals and webmasters (and get “link:” back in your hands). Creatively named Webmaster Portal (we’re really good at marketing), it will be a single, friendly place to find all tools and information relating to Live Search SEO. Initially we’ll support these scenarios:

• Troubleshooting tools to ensure MSNBot is effectively crawling and indexing your site
• Sitemap creation, submission and ping tools
• Statistics about your website
• Consolidation of content submission resources
• New content and community resources

While we expect the tools to be available publicly in late Fall, we still have some polishing to do. In the meantime we’ve created a private beta program to let adventuresome folks get their hands on the tools sooner – and help polish things by providing feedback. If you’re interested in participating in the beta program over the next few months, please send a mail to lswmp@microsoft.com to apply!

You can find the post here - http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/arc...vate-beta.aspx

[webmasterneo]

Well, that is something to look forward to. It should be good if it's targeted at SEO pros and webmasters. I just want the tools that would help me monitor the performance of my site. (Bringing the "link:" function back is definitely good news for me.) Could this be a rival to Google Analytics?

[Tails]

Maybe this will be a good tool for checking links, because Google is almost never right and I feel funny about using Yahoo sometimes. I guess we'll have to wait until Late fall to find out!

[Cameron]

Sounds interesting, I might check it out soon when it comes out. Unfortunately there is a wait for it. And wyatt is right, Google is barely never right.

[neta]

great news , may be they want to built as like google webmaster tools.