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Google

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Company Facts

Founded: September 4th, 1998
Headquarters: Mountain View, CA
Founders: Larry Page, Sergey Brin
Current CEO: Sundar Pichai
Platform Types: Search Engine, Task Completion Engine, Contextual Advertising
Parent Company: Alphabet, Inc. (GOOG)

Marketing Information

Google has become where most Americans and people around the world start their internet experience. The search engine has been evolving parts of their offering into what is called a Task Completion Engine. Marketers can take advantage of Google in 5 distinct ways:

  • Organic Search (SEO)
  • Paid Search (PPC)
  • Local Search (Local SEO)
  • News Search (News SEO)
  • Google Discover

While Google offers other types of search and discovery on their platform, those are the main 5 ways with Organic and Paid leading in most categories.

Notable Employees

Google has over 90,000 employees world-wide and thousands more contractors. However, there are some employees of the search giant that are more notable than others and important for SEOs and marketers to know about.

John Mueller
Is a Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google working out of their Zurich, Switzerland office. He started his career at Google in 2007. Prior to joining Google he was CEO of Softplus, a physiotherapy company in Switzerland. John is best known for his webmaster hangout chats and for using Twitter to engage with webmasters and SEOs often offering answers to questions and other insights.

Ray Kuerzweil
A known futurist and inventor, Ray joined the Google team in 2012 as Director of Engineering. An accomplished author and speaker he has written seven books, five which became best sellers and one of which has been translated into 9 different languages. He was awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation by President Bill Clinton in 1999, he won the 2001 Lemelson–MIT Prize, and in 2002 was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame at the U.S. Patent Office. In 2013 Inc. magazine called him “Edison’s rightful heir”.

Gary Illyes
Joined Google as Webmaster Trends Analyst in 2011. Gary is best known for discovering that Google no longer honored rel=next/prev code in websites. He’s also a frequent speaker representing Google at conferences in the U.S. and abroad and a heavy contributor to efforts to communicate with webmasters and SEOs via Google’s official blog and webmaster forums.

Ben Gomes
He joined Google early on in 1999 and has stayed with the company for 20+ years. His first project at Google was to make sure that their core algorithm, PageRank, could scale beyond the 25 million url index that Google started with. Today he serves as Vice President of Core Search and leads all of Google’s search efforts. Ben isn’t often seen discussing SEO or speaking at events.

Danny Sullivan
Cofounder of Third Door Media (Search Engine Land, Marketing Land, Search Engine Summit) and a journalist covering the Search, marketing tech, and SEO space from 1996 to 2017. Danny was a widely recognized often outspoken critic of Google frequently highlighting changes the company made that were harmful to business owners and webmasters. Danny retired from journalism and Third Door Media in 2017 and joined Google as their Search Liaison. For the past few years he has been actively replying to inquiries about Google on Twitter and working to better help the public and SEOs understand how search works. He’s also been known to discuss issues webmasters and business owners are having with Google employees.

Larry Page [former]
Co-founder of Google and namesake of Google’s core ranking invention, PageRank. Larry Page was CEO of Google twice and CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet, Inc. until he announced his resignation in a letter along with Sergey Brin on December 3rd, 2019 amidst increasing antitrust probes from governments around the world.

Sergey Brin [former]
Co-founder of Google and the driving force behind Google’s “X” or “Other bets”. Sergey is probably best known for pushing the technological boundaries of Google, for Google Glass, and working to find new revenue streams beyond the companies lucrative search engine and advertising. Sergey announced his resignation from Google and parent company Alphabet, Inc. in a letter along with Larry Page on December 3rd, 2019.

Matt Cutts [former]
Was the head of Google’s web spam team from 2000 to 2018. While at Google Matt was also a distinguished engineer and served as the interface between Google and the webmaster community. In his time at Google Matt wrote blog posts and started a video series to help people understand how Google’s search and spam filtering worked. In 2016 Matt joined the US Digital Service as acting administrator and was later confirmed in 2018 as full administrator of the department. He is likely the most well-known Google Employee by those who work in the field of SEO.

Marissa Mayer [former]
Was employee #20 at Google joining the company in 1999. In 2005 Marissa was named Vice President of Search Products and User Experience at Google, a position she would hold until 2010 when Google President Eric Schmidt would ask her to become the lead on Google’s Local, Maps, and Location services. In 2011 she was the lead on Google’s $125 million acquisition of Zagat. A year later she would leave Google to become the CEO of rival Yahoo. As CEO of Yahoo Marissa is credited with changing the company’s culture, growing their mobile user base, leading the acquisition of Tumblr, and building a valuable mobile advertising business. Ultimately though, shareholders weren’t impressed and agreed to sell the company to Verizon who would merge it with fellow internet pioneer AOL. Today she heads up Lumi Labs and serves on the boards of numerous companies and non-profits.

Amit Singhal [former]
Joined Google in 2001 and began working with the Core Search team. He was quickly promoted and named a Google Fellow and Senior Vice President of Core Search which would lead the New York Times to refer to him as the “master” of Google’s search algorithms. During Amit’s tenure at the top of Google’s search team the search engine released two well-known algorithm updates that devastated businesses named “Panda” and “Penguin”. In 2010 Fortune magazine called him “one of the smartest people in tech”. In 2011 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and was given the Outstanding Achievement in Science and Technology Award at The Asian Awards in that same year.

Amit retired from Google on February 26th, 2016 after an internal dispute over a sexual harassment allegation. He went on to Uber who released him a year later for failing to disclose the sexual harassment allegation at Google. When Amit left Google he and his wife started a non-profit called the Sitare Foundation to help educate underprivileged children. Amit’s personal website has been mostly dormant since his retirement from Google but the Sitare Foundation website and social media are semi-active.

Personal & Independent Blogs by Current and Former Google Employees

  • Addy Osmani’s Blog – Addy Osmani is currently an Engineering Manager at Google working on the Chrome team. His blog contains a few different types of posts including articles on improving Chrome performance for your website, articles about Google APIs and tools, and work productivity tips.
  • Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO – Matt Cutts is a former Google employee who as the face of Google to webmasters started blogging in July of 2005. By December of 2005 Matt had won the Search Engine Journal for “Best SEO Blog of 2005”. Today Matt serves as the Administrator for the U.S. Digital Service and his blog is rarely updated except to post a personal article or two per year. From 2005 until Matt took a leave from Google in 2015 the blog was often used by Matt to discuss SEO topcs in depth and is a great resource for understanding the history of SEO and Google’s search algorithm.

 

SEO Tools from Google

Educational Resources

Latest Posts About Google

Latest News from Google's Official Blog

Google maintains a blog called “Webmaster Central” where they release official news and announcements that impact websites on the web. This includes important announcements of changes to their crawler “Googlebot”, updates to Google Search Console, information on their nascent WordPress plugin development, and the release of new videos.

RSS Latest News from the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog

References

https://about.google/intl/en/our-story/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jilliandonfro/2019/02/04/google-parent-alphabet-reports-surge-in-spending-and-hiring-hitting-nearly-100000-employees/#1d2b3e772e8c
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/12/ray-kurzweil-the-singularity-guy-joins-google/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnmu/
https://apnews.com/36493aa8b04d4121914b38c2bc5f8ad7

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