One of Google's official blogs, and one of the most useful to site publishers anywhere, has taken down the wall between posters and visitors to allow comments.

Google's Vanessa Fox had a couple of heart-shaped boxes for Webmaster Central visitors on Valentine's Day. First, the home of Google's suite of webmaster tools has dropped the beta label:

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.

Vanessa also noted how the Sitemaps protocol, which helps Google index sites that use it better, has been updated to version 0.9. Thanks to it being embraced by Yahoo and Microsoft, it offers a standard way of communicating with the search engines.

Her blog post about these changes also included the news that the Webmaster Central blog would now be open to 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.

Leaving a comment means signing in with a Blogger or Google Account. Doing so puts the commenter in good company, as Danny Sullivan and Philipp Lenssen have already left Vanessa their congratulations.

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