Will this famous Google SEO guru quit?

In our newsletter articles, we have often mentioned Matt Cutts. He is the poster boy of Google and the search engine optimization (SEO) community. Thousands of webmasters follow every single word on this blog.

What makes Matt Cutts special in the SEO community?

He joined Google as a Software Engineer in January 2000.
He works for the quality group of Google, specializing in SEO issues.
He is one of the co-inventors listed upon one of the most well-known patent filings from Google: "Information retrieval based on historical data".
He wrote SafeSearch, Google's family filter.
He was the first to publicly propose to use historical web site information to identify link spam.
He answered questions in webmaster forums on behalf of Google (and finally amitted to being "GoogleGuy" in August 2006).
Matt Cutt's blog is the semi-offical source for upcoming Google ranking updates. On SEO conferences, there are always a lot of people around him asking SEO questions.

Why do some people think that Matt Cutts will quit?

In one of his latest blog postings he writes:

"I love working at Google, but at some point my wife is going to wake up and smell the coffee. She’ll say 'Hey, we agreed we’d try this Google thing for four or five years, and then I’d get to pick what to do next. It’s been like eight years now! When do we move on to our next adventure?'"

He joked about joining Yahoo in the past. But jokes aside, if he really left Google, it would be a huge lost for Google and the SEO community. It would take Google years to build up the same trust with the SEO community.

Matt Cutts recently published his travel and vacation plans for 2007. He plans to visit some SEO conferences in February, April and June so - luckily - it does not seem that he will be leaving Google in the near future.

Matt Cutts propagates ethical SEO methods in his blog and he tries to make sure that search engine spammers don't get good results in Google. If you use ethical search engine optimization methods, it's likely that your web pages will get high rankings on Google and all other important search engines.