Diat: Google Places Exec Finds New Place To Work

If you haven’t caught on to Google’s emphasis on local as a large part of their strategy moving forward, I suggest you look for another line of work. Google has put a great amount of effort into making their Google Places ‘product’ the centerpiece of their local and mobile strategy to grab a large slice of the mobile web pie that is currently baking.

This has not been, however, without its bumps and complete train wrecks. The person at Google who has been the most front facing employee who dare interact with the SEO community at conferences regarding this area of search has been Carter Maslan. It looks like Maslan has done his time and is headed for greener pastures.

Greg Sterling fo Search Engine Land reports

Carter Maslan has been the patient and good-natured face of Google Maps and Places at innumerable conferences and events over the past several years. He’s endured a regular onslaught of questions about missing features and local SEO frustrations surrounding Google’s increasingly important suite of local products.

Now he’s leaving Google.

I got word of this yesterday from a Google partner and then I later confirmed it in an email exchange with Maslan himself. He’s leaving the company on good terms and said he “loved” his work at Google. However he has something else he wants to pursue.

The question now remains as to who will replace Maslan in this area and what their focus will be. Will it be an escalation of the “Let them eat cake” approach to information, support and quality that Google already has or will it be someone who is looking to truly improve this area of the Goog?

I guess we’ll find out just how important the local push really is as we watch Google make this transition. In the Page-ian era Google will it be turned over to the engineers who make things that they understand but the rest of human kind simply scratches their head over?

Let’s hope not but if I were a betting man, I wouldn’t expect a customer friendly, kumbaya singing lead for this either. That’s not how Google rolls. Their MO is to just roll over anyone who has any concerns about quality and act as if they didn’t exist.

Gives one the ‘warm fuzzies’ doesn’t it?