The Live Search Webmaster team launched the Webmaster Center today, a site dedicated to helping web publishers improve their websites' rankings on Live Search. Previously in beta, the Webmaster Center offers new search engine optimization (SEO) tools to troubleshoot crawling and indexing issues. The SEO tools and resources make it easier for web publishers to get better, more relevant search results with Live Search, and drive more traffic to their websites.

Here are some highlights from the Webmaster Center blog:

Discover potential issues affecting your site

A new feature to the webmaster Center, the “Crawl Issues” feature will allow webmasters to be able to find four types of issues we encountered on their sites.

• File Not Found (404)
• Blocked by REP
• Long Dynamic URLs
• Unsupported Content-Types

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Get more and better backlink data

In the beta of the Live Search Webmaster Center we offered a limited look into backlink data. We’ve significantly enhanced this tool, giving webmasters access to more data about their referring links.

Try out the Webmaster Center at http://webmaster.live.com. Or, for more details, check out the blog and forum.