Webmaster Tools now open to everyone.

Out of Beta

[Fish_Texas]

[webmaster.live.com...]
Fish Texas

[walrus]

Thanks for sharing that, had 200 odd pages disappear, they answered my email saying they would pass it to tech team on Live but its only been a few days so i'm looking forward to this.

[OutdoorMan]

I'm not impressed. I get an error when I try to add my website: "Sorry, something went wrong. Please try again."

When I follow a link in the menu to the help forum: [forums.microsoft.com...] - I get a 404.

;)

[Lord Majestic]

Same error here...

[walrus]

Went very smooth for me except for one crucial detail.....
Try validating your robots file. Been trying for one hour, no luck.
The only time it validated was when i took out User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*

This one below finally validated but no matter what i do i cant get it to validate with the User-agent: Mediapartners-Google* It says cant use 2 user agents in same line, likeit is counting the asterisk as another agent.

User-agent: *
Sitemap: [yoursite.com...]
User-agent: *
Disallow: /stats/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /private/
Disallow: /demos/
Disallow: /tester/

Asa matter of fact it said msn could not crawl my site. is this why i was pulledfromtheir index?

This is what ive used the last 2 years, though it validated but msn says it cant crawl.

Where is the error?

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow:
User-agent:63.148.99.*
Disallow: /
User-agent:211.157.36.4
Disallow: /
User-agent:213.42.2.29
Disallow: /
User-agent:211.152.14.92
Disallow: /
User-agent:203.111.194.11
Disallow: /
User-agent:*
Disallow: /stats/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /private/
Disallow: /demos/
Disallow: /tester/

PS AAAAAAUUUGHGHHHH!

[mark_roach]

To get round the "Sorry, something went wrong. Please try again." error. Delete your cookies and cache.

[OutdoorMan]

To get round the "Sorry, something went wrong. Please try again." error. Delete your cookies and cache.

Nothing has changed for me. I still get the same error whether or not I delete cookies and cache.

I'll take this error as a message from M$ -- They don't want me to use their Webmaster tools *LOL*

[walrus]

Well i don't know if it was because of the contact i had with them or if it is the new webmaster tools but one of the sites got reindexed, at least a few pages.
Too bad the search results are the worst of all the big SE's. I have seen 3 or 4 of the old authority sites in one niche that should be in top ten on every SE get slammed to page 8 or 9.
Judging by the lack of posts on this topic it looks like most have either good results on livesearch or have given up trying.
I'm sure they are working to improve it but it can't happen to soon.

[Reno]

Judging by the lack of posts on this topic it looks like most have either good results on livesearch or have given up trying.

The latter, I would say.

People who have a single website may luck out and get it into MSN, and thus are happy (for now). But if you are managing multiple sites -- for yourself or for clients -- what you see are HUGE gaps. So given the current status quo of LIVE, the single-site webmasters who make it into the MSN index today may be gone tomorrow. That has happened so often (to many of the people at this board), it is almost a likelihood, at some point.

Personally, I would love nothing more than for MS to offer a first class search engine that rapidly took 30% of the market. Unfortunately, the reality is that they are losing users and now have less than 10% of websurfers, with webmasters openly complaining about obvious problems that are not being addressed. Because of that track record, it's hard to be very optimistic, which may explain why so many have given up trying.

..........................

[walrus]

That makes sense, too bad for them and us.