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Jonathan Simon of Google announced on Google+ that he is leaving the Google Webmaster team at the end of this month after being with the team for over five years.
What is interesting is that Susan Moskwa made the same announcement a couple days ago. Why are they both leaving to join different teams in Google?
Are they tired of whinny webmasters (no offense) or are they not fit for the role (Google is just discovering this after 5+ years) or does Google want some new blood?
Jonathan has helped hundreds of webmasters through his forum contributions, Google+ Hangouts and documentation and videos. He wrote on Google+:
For those of you that may not have heard - I'm leaving the Google Webmaster Tools team at the end of the month after 5+ years of supporting webmasters. I'll still be around though because I'm joining the Google Cloud team! Stay tuned for more details… :)If there's something webmaster related that you might have pinged me about in the past please feel free to contact one of these three founts of webmaster knowledge:
+John Mueller, +Gary Illyes, and +Pierre Far
Thanks for everything Jonathan and best of luck in the cloud!
Forum discussion at Google+.
Comments:
Alistair Lattimore
09/21/2012 12:49 pm
Maybe there is a simple answer why they've both moved at roughly the same time. Is it possible they both had stock options which tied to five years of their employment contract?
Terry Van Horne
09/21/2012 01:08 pm
"Thanks for everything Jonathan and best of luck in the cloud!" If the reference to the cloud is "the cloud" it makes sense to move people from the webmaster team to the cloud team as I assume they would be dealing with some webmasters there. So experience with webmasters would be a good thing
Kevin Gerding
09/21/2012 06:18 pm
Google's Webmaster Help Forum is nothing but an unmoderated free for all. Instead of actually getting help, most people find it is nothing more than a public bash session. I'd want to leave the webmaster team too if I had to put up with the nonsense that happens there every day.
Sumit
09/22/2012 12:22 pm
its been a wonderful experience to have an expert like you in google webmaster forum, best of luck mate
djbaxter
09/22/2012 06:05 pm
Don't they realize all those "whinny webmasters" are just horsing around?
Gregory Smith
09/23/2012 12:54 am
I have to agree with you Kevin.
Andy
09/24/2012 07:40 am
Do you think that there is nothing above and beyond google? Maybe he/they got a financially better offer or are starting their own business (together).
Steven Lockey
09/28/2012 03:55 pm
While this has happened a few times, the majority of the time what happens is the 'webmaster' comes in slagging off Google and saying everything is Google's fault and they owe him something for some reason, THEN when people point out the flaws with their website that are causing the problem, they accuse the people trying to help of just 'bashing their site' when the truth of the matter is, they don't want to learn or do anything to improve their site, they just want Google to give them position #1 and think if they bitch enough it will happen.