reseller - 11:16 am on Jul 27, 2006 (gmt 0)

Hi Folks

Thanks for your contributions so far. Much appreciated!

When Google appoint one or more of its own employees to be webmaster liaison, I assume that those employees get paid to do that . Also when those same employees attend conferences and public meetings. I.e we are not talking about private contributions of Google employees in that connection but part of their paid jobs.

IMO, the golden days of Google-Webmasters communications were the days of our kind member GoogleGuy (GG). He was very helpful, friendly and most important tolerant to critic (and bashing). GG was always there when we needed him. Q&A of GG were very popular indeed. And most of us looked at GG as part of our webmasters community, rather than as only a Google employee.
GG has chosen top communicate with webmasters on their own platforms. And especially, WebmasterWorld Forum 30 was THE forum on which GG contributed most.

As to the kind Adam Lasnik, I guess its still early to issue a judgment about his efforts as a webmaster liaison. We continue to wish him luck and look forward to his contributions.

I guess things went wrong when Google-Webmasters communications moved for the most part from webmasters forums to Google's blogs and the kind Matt Cutts blog. Though Matt is a kind guy, he follows ZERO tolerant policy for any critical viewpoints to Google. And he has been focusing more and more on marketing and promoting Google's products and services, unfortunately. A visit to Matt's blog and view of his recent posts illustrate exactly what I mean.

The consequences of deterioration of Google-Webmasters communications mightbe serious ones. For example, if the current critical situation continue, Google employees might risk that the webmasters community will start ignoring them in the same way they are ignoring the webmasters communities. Furthermore, webmasters wouldn't find it of interest at all to pay to attained conferences where Google employees are listed as main speakers etc.. etc...

Having said that, I still wish somebody in Google bring the current thread contents to the attentions of Google's management in an effort to improve the current Google-Webmasters communications.