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Although the Google Sitemaps service itself has been around for a few months, its supporting team tweaks and adds new features on about a monthly basis. Mike McDonald sat in on Google's sponsored luncheon for some free food with a side of Matt Cutts and Vanessa Fox.

Although we have covered Google Sitemaps in depth recently, today's lunch at WebmasterWorld's PubCon Boston featured some extra coverage of the service with commentary from Sitemaps technical writer Vanessa Fox and well-known Google engineer Matt Cutts.

The Googlers handled some questions from the grazing audience, and our Mike was able to tear himself away from the cheerful box lunch long enough to ask one: "Can Sitemaps do anything for canonical problems?" An example of that would be webpronews.com versus www.webpronews.com.

Cutts replied, "We've had that feedback a lot, and now that Bigdaddy is in place it is definitely something I'll pass along."

So why were Googlers taking Sitemaps questions at lunch today, when the product has been out since June 2005? Cutts describes Sitemaps as the ground floor of a Google program whereby Google can communicate with webmasters and webmasters can communicate with Google.

Sitemaps also maintains a blog and participates in a Google Group to inform webmasters about changes and updates to the service.

The Googlers had a question for the lunchtime audience, too. They asked if people wanted an email in their inbox saying, "Hey you're doing something bad and we're penalizing you." Everybody in the audience said yes, and Cutts and Fox said they would pass that info along.

No surprise with that response, as webmasters everywhere have begged for better communications with Google; those emails would be a good step toward improved dialogue with the search advertising company.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.