Last week we announced Project Silk Road, our vision for delivering a broad suite of products and services for publishers and web developers, including a customizable Live Search API, rich content, multiple media and source types, and the ability to monetize through ad-serving.

Today we’re expanding our toolkit with two important updates to Webmaster Center: the ability to detect malware on your site and the sites you link to, plus a greatly simplified authentication process that makes accessing our tools much easier. Together these updates help improve your site performance for Live Search, and protect you and your customers from inadvertent exposure to malware.

Here are just a things our tools can help you do.

Malware Detection

• Detect whether there is malware present on any of your webpages or on any of the webpages you link to (all these links will be disabled and flagged in the search results as malware).
• Download reports detailing which webpages on your website are affected and how to fix the problem.
• Ping our support team to get your sites re-scanned and re-included in Live results within days, not weeks.

Simplified Authentication

• One authentication code per user account can be used to authenticate multiple websites.
• If you already have an account with the Webmaster Center and previously used unique authentication codes for each registered website, no worries. Webmaster Center will continue to support all of your current authentication codes and methods.
• Bonus – the last successful authentication method becomes the default method. We keep track of it so you don’t have to.

You can read more about this at the Live Search Webmaster Center blog.

The tools can be found at http://webmaster.live.com/. Give them a try and stay safe out there!

Angus Norton, Senior Director, Live Search

[via Livesearch blog]