Got Crawl Issues? Live Search Can Help

Microsoft launched its first major update to Live Search

In other words, it answers a lot of FAQs, provides a lot of data, and eliminates a lot of theorizing in terms of penalties and/or achieving higher placement. "No other search engine provides this data," Buggia assured us.

The update revolves around a few frequently posed questions about improving a website's relationship with a search engine. Is my site being crawled and indexed? Did the Live Search bot encounter any issues while crawling my site? Have I incurred any penalties? Who's linking to my site? Is my robots.txt file configured properly?

Broken links/File Not Found (404): Webmaster Tools will list URLs Live Search tried to crawl but was unable to due to removed content or misspelled link.

Robots Exclusion Protocol: Obviously, if robots.txt, a meta tag, or HTTP header attribute is used to block a search crawler, it's generally on purpose. On the off chance a URL is blocked inadvertently, Webmaster Tools will provide a list of links not indexed for this reason.

Your link's too long: Live Search flags URLs with "exceptionally long query strings" for fear of an infinite loop scenario (Google calls them "
Unsupported Content-Types: Live Search likes content types like HTML, XML, Powerpoint, etc., and maintains a list of acceptable content types. Unsupported content-types, like .exe files, are not supported and will not be indexed by Live Search.
Buggia says that, unlike Google, Live Search does not penalize for backlinks coming from shady neighborhoods. Nevertheless, a webmaster likes to know where his or her traffic originates. For that reason, Webmaster Tools now has a filter functionality that allows webmasters to track backlinks from specific domains or subdomains (digg.com for example), and from top level domains (.fr, .uk, etc.).
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Got Crawl Issues? Live Search Can Help

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