The final version of the Live Search Webmaster Center is now live, four months short of a year since the service debuted into Beta. Microsoft's focus with the Center was to provide a hotspot dedicated to the Search Engine Optimization tools and tasks associated with bridging websites with its search engine. Even though Microsoft's Live Search is a distant third on the search engine market behind Google and Yahoo, it is a potential source of traffic that cannot be ignored. The Redmond company is certainly making efforts to ensure that webmasters and SEO professionals will not overlook Live Search, and the new tools, along with the update that took the Center out of beta, are ample proof of the software giant's commitment in this regard.

"We are bringing our Webmaster Tools out of beta and releasing several new features that help webmasters see how Live Search crawls and indexes your sites. As a website owner, you can use these tools to improve your results on Live Search when a someone is looking for your site. The new Webmaster tools give you more data about referring links, identify issues Live Search encountered when crawling your site, and help you improve the overall indexing of your site," indicated Nathan Buggia, from the Live Search Webmaster Center.

The final version of the Live Search Webmaster Center features new items such as the "Crawl Issues" option, designed to highlight crawling problems such as: File Not Found (404); Blocked by REP; Long Dynamic URLs and Unsupported Content-Types. The Webmaster Center now also provides extensive information about a website's backlinks, providing a perspective over the environment of pages linking to it.

"This update includes several new features that provide webmasters more information about how Live Search is crawling and indexing their sites, as well as a few features to make the data more actionable," stated Jeremiah Andrick, program manager, Live Search Webmaster Center. More actionable data translates into the Advanced Filtering and Downloading Data features, set up to provide webmasters with all the info they require, even offline.