I have been wondering about Matt Cutts and what he is doing these days.
The Internet is a very strange place sometimes and the notion that I know someone that I never even met is even more odd to me.
However I in fact know a lot about Matt Cutts, because I go back to the beginning of Google and I was even around before Matt Cutts. I like to call myself "the old man of the Internet" sometimes when I have all the 25 year old people working for me all over the world.
I used to email with Matt Cutts a lot in the early days and I still enjoy reading some of his old emails to me. Unfortunately things changed to a negative "no communication" Google style in the recent years.
Now that I know Google senior management reads my blog, I can not help giving Google some good ideas on this topic.
Google is the most successful company ever, since business began. Please read that line a few times, so it can be difficult to tell that successful of a company that they could be ten times bigger and more profitable. However since I have made a lot of money on Google stock over the last ten years as a shareholder I want to give the most valuable ideas I have to Google.
Google please hire a senior outside Internet/Software/SEO/SEM CEO to become the liaison E.g. Vice President of SEO Relations, or some important title with VP in it. This way Google could vastly improve their current terrible relations with SEO companies, etc. All SEO companies I know still help their clients spend a ton of money on Adwords. My company has several clients that spend over $1,000,000 per month on Google Adwords. Who helps them spend all that money with Google? Me.
I can think of two people that would be perfect for this job. One is Rand Fishkin and the other is Tom Forrest.
Matt Cutts did the best he could, yet he is not really the best fit. Matt you are fantastic, however you never worked outside of Google and you are still much more of an "engineering" type personality. This VP job I am describing is a person that has very strong entrepreneurial skills and has actually worked in our industry outside of Google. The job would require world class marketing, technology and engineering skills. People that are multi-talented like this are very difficult to find.
Please do not misunderstand me, Matt and I were not friends and we had some very tough email battles, yet I respected him and thought he was highly intelligent and he was "always trying to do the right thing" for all parties. He is a person that tries his best to be fair and I admire that quality in people. Even though their were a few times I think he made a bad decision, I think 85% of the time I would agree with Matt Cutts on his decisions.
Yes Matt Cutts did some very nice things for me. I remember once I was in Perth Australia and we had a very serious hacker attack and Google (Matt Cutts) helped to save me.
I will never forget that. Thank you Matt.
He also took some penalties off some of my clients that deserved to be penalized. E.g. these were clients that came to my company already penalized by a prior SEO company.
Anyway Matt, good luck whatever you decide to do.