On the road to delivering the Project Silk Road vision, Microsoft managed to kick its Live Search Webmaster Center to the next level. The fall 2008 refresh to the Webmaster Center comes after the major August 2008 update, and is designed to deliver additional resources to web content owners. Microsoft emphasized that it had enhanced the capabilities, permitting web content owners to analyze crawl issues with their websites, but also increased antimalware features, as well as a simplification of the authentication process.

In this regard, the Crawl Issues tool introduced in August will now also help detect and report pieces of malware, if any, associated with websites.

“As Live Search crawls the Web, it finds many pages infected with malware. We flag all pages containing or linking to detected malware with a 'Malware' warning message in the search engine results page, and disable the link to the page to protect customers,” revealed Jeremiah Andrick, program manager, Live Search Webmaster Center.

The updated Crawl Issues tool in Webmaster Center will permit content owners to determine if their websites are spreading malicious code and to remove any eventual threats. At the same time, Microsoft has updated the Outbound Links tool, which allows webmasters not only to sniff malicious code on their websites, but also to assess potential threats from the websites they link to.

Authentication had also been simplified considerably, Microsoft explained. Essentially, webmasters would no longer have to deal with different authorization codes for different web properties. “In this update, we have simplified the authentication process by allowing you to use one authentication code for all your sites. In addition, you no longer need to specify between XML or HTML authentication methods for each registered site. You need only to add an authentication code to the site, and we will check for both methods automatically,” Andrick added.