Microsoft has expanded the Live Search Webmaster Center toolkit with new items designed to sniff for malware. Via the tools added to the Webmaster Center, web content owners will be able to detect malicious code present on their website, or on the pages of a website that they link to.

The Redmond giant's corner of Live Search dedicated to webmasters has offered from the get-go the possibility of assessing a site’s outbound links. With the new tools the company has simply taken these capabilities one step further, with the addition of the malware detection feature, permitting webmasters to filter links that could pose risks to users. Microsoft informed that the links pointing to web content used to spread malicious code would be disabled, with the Live Search engine automatically flagging them as malware, and permitting webmasters to filter links that could pose risks to users.

“One of the biggest dangers to searchers on the Web today is a maliciously hijacked website that injects malware onto a user’s computer. Oftentimes, this happens when the site with the malware download is a trusted site. When you link out to other sites you trust, you typically have no way of knowing if those site owners are actually keeping their sites secured and free of malware. As the owner of a site, you want to protect your customers from this kind of malware,” revealed Jeremiah Andrick, program manager, Live Search Webmaster Center.

The revamped Outbound Links tool in Webmaster Center will permit webmasters not only to sniff for malware on their websites and outbound links, but also to download reports of the assessments, which can be analyzed offline.

Taken into consideration first and foremost the scenario where legitimate websites are being hijacked, Microsoft is allowing webmasters to fix the problem, and then ping Microsoft's support team in order to get the “sites re-scanned and re-included in Live results within days, not weeks,” promised Angus Norton, senior director, Live Search.

“With the updated tools in Webmaster Center, if you have any malware issues on either your own pages or on outbound links, you will be able to: identify the affected pages quickly and easily; read helpful advice in Help on how to fix the problem; submit a request, once you have cleaned up the malware, asking the Live Search support team to re-scan your website and remove the malware warning flags from any affected webpages in the Live Search results webpage,” Andrick added.