Google Webmaster Central Leaves Beta; Its Blog Gains Comments

Google Webmaster Central has
officially come out of beta, about a year-and-a-half after Google Sitemaps —
core of the service later renamed Google Webmaster Central —

launched. To celebrate, a new era for Google. The Official Google Webmaster
Central Blog becomes the first official Google blog to gain comments. Google
announces both news items

here, including a tidbit that Google Webmaster Central now has more than one million users.

The Google Webmaster Central team already actively monitors a number of
third-party discussion forums such as
Digital Point Forums, Search
Engine Watch Forums and Webmaster
World. They also actively participate by commenting on blogs across the web.
In addition, they also participate in Google’s own
Google Webmaster
Help group within Google Groups.

Still, people like to comment on blog posts directly. We saw Google come
under renewed criticism (see
here,
here
and

here) earlier this year for not allowing comments in association with
official blog posts, in the way that Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask do. So in what’s
now billed as a "Valentine’s Day gift," comments finally come to Google via at
least one official blog.

Want to comment or see comments? Find the "Permalink" link at the bottom of
any posts on the blog’s home page. That jumps you to the post itself, where you
will see a "Post a Comment" link at the end of the post. If there are comments,
you’ll see these as well. To comment, you have to be registered through
Blogger.

One more tip. Not understanding why your links to particular Google posts
fail to show up? Perhaps you’ve been finding errors like I was getting similar
to this:

Ping ‘https://adwords.blogspot.com/2007/02/meet-click-quality-team.html’
failed: HTTP error: 405 Method Not Allowed

Here’s how to see your links show up. The "Links to this post" that are shown
for Google blog posts are powered by
Google Blog Search. Your link will show up if Google Blog Search discovers
you’re linking to a particular blog post on one of the Google official blogs.

Next, the most important point. Google Blog Search only looks at what’s in
your feed, not what’s on the page you’ve written. This is crucial for those who
only put out partial feeds. If your link to a blog post is "buried" in a story
and doesn’t show up in the partial feed (usually the first few opening
paragraphs of a story), then Google Blog Search won’t find it. Ping all you want
— that link won’t be a trackback item on an official Google blog. Instead, you
need the link to show up within the feed you put out.