Search Engine Journal

It looks like Microsoft is revving up its Live Search Webmaster Center to put it back in shape after releasing the tool out of beta. Aside from the new features that we covered a couple of days ago, the Webmaster Center tool is reviving its Backlink checker to give more information on referring links.

Of course, we all know how important these information are for webmasters trying to work their way to the top of the Live Search SERPs for their sites targeted keyword. Knowing the quality of links that your site gets would enable you to assess their importance and how valuable these links are to your site’s ranking.

Once you know who is linking to your site and what pages on your site they are linking to, you can further research those sites to determine the worth of those links, as well as opportunities for promotion. The quality of links is important and knowing who links in to your site can help you determine the value of those links.

So, if you go to your Webmaster Center account and access any of your site, just click on the Backlinks tab and from there select the filtering options available - whether to filter the results by top-level domain, subdomain or subfolder.

This is a useful tool if you want to know how popular your sites are on social media sites, such as digg, technorati or reddit. By filtering the Backlinks using digg.com, you’ll get the number of links to your site coming from Digg.

Additionally, for big sites, their webmasters can opt to download the first 1000 backlinks of their respective sites in CSV file for viewing offline.

We got to give to the Live Search Webmaster Center team for these developments. In SEO work, one of the hardest search engine to penetrate when optimizing a site is Live Search, particularly because of the absence of this webmaster analytics tools. Live Search Webmaster Center may be a late bloomer as compared to Google and Yahoo’s respective Webmaster analytics tools, but these new features would certainly add value to its functionality.