In an announcement that really wasn’t too surprising, Matt Cutts from Google has announced he is extending his leave into 2015.

Matt Cutts originally announced his four month leave back in July, and it was anticipated that he would be back from leave in November.  But he tweeted on Friday that he was planning to extend his leave through 2015, with a link to an update on his original blog post.

When I went on leave, I wanted to see how webspam would go without me. I’ve been talking to people on both the algorithmic and manual webspam teams during my leave, and they’ve been doing a top-notch job. So I’m planning on extending my leave into 2015.

Of course,  “into 2015” is pretty open ended and there are those who question whether he will return to Google or if he will move onto something else when he does decide to get back to work.  He has been keeping himself busy with running marathons, promoting political causes, and tweeting random articles on a wide variety of topics.

However, there has definitely been no lack of communication from the webmaster team at Google, and multiple people have stepped up in his absence, including John Mueller with his regular Google Webmaster Office Hours, as well as both Gary Illyes and Pierre Far.  But none quite have the same persona as Cutts, or draw the crowds at conferences that he does.  And no one else has stepped up with the popular Webmaster Help Videos that were regularly posted on YouTube.

It also coincidentally comes hot on the heels of the announcement that Cutts’ counterpart at Bing, Duane Forrester, was laid off.

Will we see Cutts return to the webspam team?  If you are a white hat, you are hoping he will, while I am sure the black hats hope he makes his leave permanent 🙂