Farewell to Vanessa Fox, Google Webmaster Central Product Manager

If you’ve been doing SEO for a while (or have been following my SEO blog at all), you’re probably well aware of who Vanessa Fox is. For those of you not aware, she was the Product Manager for Google’s Webmaster Central. Webmaster Central is a great tool for site managers or web masters to use to ensure the most thorough crawl of their sites and get answers to the questions they have specific to optimization of their web sites for Google organic search results.

I’m frequently amazed at the celebrity status both Vanessa and Matt Cutts of Google have at the Search Marketing conferences. It’s virtually impossible to catch either of them alone as they get bombarded by the masses of SEOs trying to glean the latest nugget of information or share their own site challenges in the hopes that they’ll find a solution. Anyone in the SEO world knows that these two people hold a lot of valuable information that is extremely useful to web masters and SEO professionals.

But beyond their knowledge base, there seems top be a lot of interest in the personal lives of these two mini-celebs. In fact, they have their own SEO paparazzi following them around during these conferences – Vanessa can barely sneak a shot of tequila without it being captured on film and immediately posted to flickr! There are currently over 100 pictures with the tags Vanessa Fox on flickr, most of which were taken at various conferences.  Hey, there’s even one with me from SES NY – I’m an SEO celebrity by association!


You can see from Vanessa’s blog about her move to Zillow (a really cool real estate web site if you’re in the market to buy or sell a home) that she’s extremely popular – 70 comments last I checked – now that’s a reader base!

I’m sad to see Vanessa leave Google for entirely selfish reasons. I still have so much feedback for Webmaster Central from how to manage tracking URLs to country-specific search (outside the US) but I do wish her luck at her now job and in her new city (she’s moving to Seattle).

Vanessa has some big shoes to fill at Google and I hope whoever takes her place will pick up where she left off with the advancements to the Webmaster Central product – especially the scalability of the product for complex, global, enterprise companies like HP.

Good luck Vanessa!