Yesterday we spoke about Webmaster Tools and Sitemaps from Google. Google is not alone, though, in the Webmaster tools sphere at the large search engines. Both Yahoo! and MSN Live now also offer similar services. Although, to be honest Google’s offering is a bit more robust right now– who knows what the future has to offer.

MSN kicked off August, by taking their Live Webmaster Tools out of Beta. Like Google had previously, at Live you are now able to get more information about how Live Search is crawling and indexing your site. As well, you can submit a sitemap. There is also a feature for “crawl issues” which will advise you of such things as File Not Found (404) or Unsupported Content-Types. The good news is that for each issue, Live will return the URL and when the issue was last encountered. You can also examine backlinks and outbound links. Below is a screen capture of the Live welcome screen (click to enlarge).

Yahoo! has just updated their Webmaster Tool experience last week. Their Webmaster Tool area is called Site Explorer. Yahoo! Site Explorer is more than just providing information to webmasters. It allows webmasters to tell Yahoo! what to do with their site, using functions such as submitting feeds, deleting URLs or reporting spam. According to Yahoo! the most successful function among all has been that of Dynamic URL Rewriting.

The new version of Yahoo! Site Explorer was made to allow future expansion for new features. The newest version now includes a new Site Summary page to provide statistics for authenticated sites. On top of this, they also increased the number of rules for Dynamic URL Rewriting. They are now offering 10 instead of only 3. Below is a screen capture of the Yahoo Site Explorer welcome screen (click to enlarge).

A important note: both Yahoo! and MSN Live, (like Google) require you to upload, or add a meta tag to “authenticate” or validate you are in fact the webmaster (or owner of the website) before sharing the goods within. Other that this, both tools are pretty easy to use. Between Yahoo!, MSN Live, and Google, you cover almost 90% of the search world, so it makes sense to make sure you are being displayed as you wish.

Should you need more help understanding or using these tools we are more than happy to help just contact Mark8t E-Marketing Solutions today.