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Vanessa Fox: From Google’s go-to girl, to media babe
When people think of Google, they usually think of Matt Cutts. Matt has a following; you can usually find him at conferences by looking for the huge swarm of search-marketers gathered around him. However, what these Matt Cutts groupies don’t realize is that there’s someone else they can talk to. She knows as much as he does about Google issues, she draws a smaller crowd—and she’s more accessible. This is Vanessa Fox, the product manager for Google’s Webmaster Tools and Webmaster Central. Vanessa Fox started working in Google’s Seattle office in 2005. She’s from California originally, and she moved to Seattle to work with AOL and for an Internet start-up company. She graduated from the University of the Pacific in 1993, and got her first job as a webmaster in 1995. You could say she’s been with the Internet from its beginning. Webmaster Tools and Webmaster Central originally started as Google Sitemaps. Webmaster Tools provides programs that help webmasters optimize their sites, including software that shows the keyword queries that pull up a site on Google, its rankings for various keywords, diagnostic tools that pinpoint indexing errors, and much more. Webmaster Central includes blogs, forums, and a help center—ways for webmasters to connect with each other and with Google staff. Google encourages its employees to devote 20% of their in-house work to an outside interest. Vanessa used her 20% to work with Mozilla, writing development documentation for their Developer Wiki on how webmasters could better integrate their sites with Firefox. Vanessa is also interested in translation, and helped coordinate volunteer translator. During her Google days Vanessa could be seen at conferences wearing a shirt with a Google logo that incorporates the feminine gender symbol as Vanessa was firmly committed to bringing more women on board at Google. In the summer of 2007 Vanessa left Google and undertook a position at Zillow an online real estate company . Since then Vanessa has learnt to juggle a number of interesting roles that includes working as a features editor at Search Engine Land, a moderator at Sphinn and working with Ignition Partners. Vanessa also hosts a weekly radio show on webmaster radio called GoodKarma. Useful website Interview with Vanessa Fox and Matt Cutts at Pubcon 2007
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