Many are excited that Microsoft has announced that they will be building out a webmaster portal. The portal will be similar to that of Yahoo's Site Explorer of Google's Webmaster Central.

As Danny Sullivan explains, the portal will help consolidate forms and help documentation, plus offer tools on:

• Linking data
• Indexing data
• Crawling data

Microsoft is now accepting private beta requests, just email lswmp@microsoft.com to make your request.

When should we expect the launch of these tools? Microsoft says it will be "available publicly in late Fall." I certainly hope so. Why am I skeptical? They have made promises in the past and did not come through until just recently.

So we will see...

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

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