Wednesday, February 14, 2007 at 1:48 AM
Here at webmaster central, we love the webmaster community -- and today, Valentine's Day, we want to show you that our commitment to you is stronger than ever. We're taking webmaster tools out of beta and enabling comments on this blog.Bye, bye beta
We've come a long way since our initial launch of the Sitemaps protocol in June 2005. Since then, we've expanded to a full set of webmaster tools, changed our name, listened to your input, and expanded even more. 2006 was a year of great progress, and we're just getting started. Coming out of beta means that we're committed to partnering with webmasters around the world to provide all the tools and information you need about your sites in our index. Together, we can provide the most relevant and useful search results. And more than a million of you, speaking at least 18 different languages, have joined in that partnership.
In addition to the many new features that we've provided, we've been making lots of improvements behind the scenes to ensure that webmaster tools are reliable, scalable, and secure.
The Sitemaps protocol has evolved into version 0.9, and Microsoft and Yahoo have joined us in that support to provide standards that make it easier for you to communicate with search engines. We're excited about how much information we've been able to learn about your sites and we plan to continue to develop the best ways for you to provide us with information about individual pages on your sites.
Hello, comments
Our goal is improved communication with webmasters, and while our blog, discussion forum, and tools help us reach that goal, you can now post comments and feedback directly on this blog as well. This helps you talk to us about topics we're posting. We want to do all we can to encourage an open dialogue between Google and the webmaster community; this is another avenue to do that.
As always, if you have questions or want to talk about things other than a particular blog post, head over to our discussion forum. You'll find our team there often, answering questions and gathering feedback. And if you haven't already, check out the "links to this post" link under every post to see other discussions of this blog across the web.
Thank you, webmasters, for joining us in this great collaboration. Happy Valentine's Day.
57 comments:
Thanks for opening up comments. I have a question for a future post. Is it a "sneaky redirect" (per your webmaster guidelines) to send some users to a registration page that does not contain the words available in the search results page snippet (the words the Google user searched for)?
Excellent to see you are now taking comments. And a big pat on the back to you all for creating the Links option in Webmaster Tools. Great work!
Congratulations on leaving beta and the move to add comments!
Comments on a Google blog ... Congrats to be the first Google blog with comments. I hope the others are following.
Congrats on coming out of BETA. Webmaster Tools are fantastic, our clients love the service (although they usually don't know about it until we tell them!). You should ask your Valentine's logo designer to use spell check heh heh.
Happy Valentine Day!
Wow, unexpected gift, thanks for the comments.. btw Happy Valentine's Day!
Thanks.
We love you too
Congrats team! Ooh, my very first comment :)
Bravo on opening up comments. Transparency and feedback can be difficult, but they contribute substantially to the public good.
Thank you for enabling commenting. I don't suppose you could separate individual comments vertically so they're a bit easier to read please?
Finally I got the idea there are real people behind the scene :D
Just wanted to mark history with the rest. My first comment on a Google blog. ;-)
Thanks guys.
To open your blog(s) for webmasters comments - great thing! Congratulations and Happy Valentine's day!
Happy Valentine's Day! It's great to see all this stuff develop.
Ed
Hi google-Webmaster Team,
it's great that you allow commenting now!
I really like the news services as your backlinks. But it woould be great to be able to group the links to the tld, so you can get a better impression, how many different sites link to you.
greeting, andré
Thank you Google! And congrats! :D
This is great! Expect a lot of spam, though.
Thanks for opening up the comments, and for all the great work that you and your team have done on Webmaster Tools, Vanessa!
P.S. Have a great Valentine's Day!
双喜临门！
Excellent! The lastest improvements to the WebMaster Console makes me even MORE loyal to Google, now more than ever... ;)
The only reason I started using Yahoo, was because of the backlinks thingy, which in turn made me inadvertedly use other of their services, which I now also use. So it's great that you've finally decided it was time to evolve...! Great job!
Wonderful :-). Indeed a great time to grant wishes!
Enjoy Valentine's Day everybody!
Hi Google Webmaster Central!
I think you've done a more than wonderful job so far and you can be proud of what you've done to the webmaster world! Congratulations!
Vanessa is a search engine Rock Star, and this only helps! Congrats.
hello world
Nice to see comments on an offiical Google blog :)
see if you can improve my site at http://www.rupya.com
Thanks for setting a precedent. Maybe some of the other Google blogs will follow suit.
Happy Valentine Day! and thank you for comment :)
Thank you Google for embracing Social Media. I love Webmaster Tools and hope you guys keep up with things to make my life better. Kudos on taking comments
Yeah for opening up the comments section! Now I actually feel like I can respond to the Googlers, instead of having to email them (which can be annoying).
Thanks for all that you guys (and gals) are doing! It's good to see Google becoming more open in the blogosphere. Now if only most of the other blogs could open up their comment section.
Well done you guys. Thanks for all the hard work, it really has been useful to a lot of us.
FINALLY out of beta! That's grrreat! :)
Hey everyone, thanks for the encouraging words!
Thanks for the kind words. Our team is very excited!
Philipp, that sounds like a great blog post idea. We'll put something together on that.
Dave, we'll see what we can do about the spacing to make the comments more legible. Thanks for the suggestion.
Andre, we are definitely looking to add to the links feature, so thanks for the feedback.
I wanted to also mention that two other Google blogs have comments enabled so we are in good company:
Llibrarian Central http://librariancentral.blogspot.com/
Google Testing: http://googletesting.blogspot.com/
I always wondered when this would happen, don't forget about Google Groups though because that is less noisy than "comments", I see Adam over there offering some great advice, been wishing for this sinse 2003, thanks.
Aaron
Congrats!!!! Long overdue but certainly a step in the right direction. HVD!!!
good news. happy day.
Thanks, that's nice move :)
I love the comment section, where I can get feedback from all...
Great news! Enabling comments on the blog will probably help bring new ideas to the table. Thanks for all your hard work. :)
Hello, nice move :)
And i would like to get some official directions about getting some spidering (and results) in a flash site.
You know, i have some customers that want (extremely) multimedial sites and they want to be well indexed too with their keywords!!!.
It's actually very hard to explain that you can't obtain the same results of a pure html website!
I'm wondering if i can "legally" insert an hidden "div" with some text "under" the flash, that could be read only by the spiders.
Of course i'm talking about properly written and formatted texts, not long lists of keywords to increase the keyword density!
Failing that, it would be nice to have an "Official Guideline" about optimizing Flash sites in google :)
Thanks in advance for any hint and for the general awesomeness :)
thanks for this opportunity
this is the best Valentine gift!
It's been a sharp learning curve with the effects of Webmaster tools but at least we can begin to see where we stand with Google - thanks. The Links tool is great - I was able to see that Google cold not see my links on one of my sites and have since amended them.
Well done opening up comments. Well done getting Webmaster Central out of Beta. And Vanessa, well done at SES London. Good info. Thank you.
How about a post on how a webmaster who feels their site is being penalized can contact Google about it. As it stands right now, if there is some strange behaviour ocurring there is absolutely no way to contact the right people. Email support tends to give you the typical your not penalized response where there is something definitively wrong with the site
It was great to hear this was going live at SES London. It was great to meet Vanessa, Matt and everyone else from Google.
Would also like to thank Matt for the help on Home and Garden gifts. It was great talking to you.
How about clearing up a mystery or two?
What made the Blogger team think that writers would like a NO-INDEX tage added to their blogs? Nothing like waking up in the morning and finding your blog vanished from the Google index.
Why did Blogger feel it necessary to insist on saved passwords for FTP? Surely you can understand that some of us consider our FTP password a high security issue and our Google/Blogger account something to access from a cafe.
Why does Blogger need need to republish the whole blog by default when that FTP password is changed?
Might strike you as small issues, but cost me 20 to 25 hours of aggrevation, mainly replacing old posts which had been hand-edited and which Blogger overwrote without warning.
You've given me a case of Internet Publishing Fatigue and it got my readers worried that I'm clincally depressed:-) Fortunately, most of them know me better, and I don't have to worry about any new readers getting confused until the blog gets reindexed!
Yea!!!
I'm a little behind getting my first post in here but I've added it to my reader and GDesktop so I'll be watching :o)
Thanks G!
Comments are great... er, except for Adam and Vanessa and anyone else at Google trying to keep up. :)
Google Webmaster Central out of BETA
http://webmaster-central.blogspot.com/2007/02/google-webmaster-central-out-of-beta.html
What can I say except cool. I have to say that I enjoy blogs a lot more when they have comments. Gives it a sense of community.
Thanks for adding up comments.
Happy Valentine's day!
thank you.
Hi everyone,
Since over a year has passed since we published this post, we're closing the comments to help us focus on the work ahead. If you still have a question or comment you'd like to discuss, free to visit and/or post your topic in our Webmaster Help Group.
Thanks and take care,
The Webmaster Central Team
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