Everyone is like: haha that is funny, or evil, but think about it for a second<p>Consider large financial groups. Often they have both investment banking and wealth management divisions. Let's say IB is a primary dealmaker for country's oil industry. Why would WM division hire an analyst covering oil industry, combing through the public sources? They already have insider knowledge of the industry!<p>Oh wait...<p>Except that it is expressly illegal and finance is required by law to maintain "glass wall" between certain divisions and control the flow of information.<p>It is quite believable that Google would want to avoid accusations of unfair competition, self-regulate, and hire an SEO person for one of their non-search related businesses, like Nest or broadband, or carpool service, and maintain some degree of plausible deniability that it does not use insider information to compete with other non-search-related companies.
It makes sense. Believe it or not, a lot of the marketing and SEO opportunities are completely ignored on most projects. Google is a huge company. I doubt they are doing a good job with their own SEO on the smaller projects that aren't related to the search engine.
It sounds awesome if SEO is your field, but at the same time I have to wonder how much you'd actually learn.<p>I imagine they would not tell this person much insider info, because then they would be far too dangerous when they <i>left</i> google.
I am not sure why Google would hire an SEO manager for their apps, they should just inflate their sites to the top anyways from the search team...it would be cheaper. However it is possible that they need an SEO manager to help them with other search engines beside's their own. Perhaps they are trying to capture additional marketshare (despite being obvious market leaders) from the smaller guys!
Nitpick: 2 typos in one sentence: "From lightning fast IaaS to innovate container technology" should be "From lightning-fast IaaS to innovative container technology".<p>And yes, ironic.