Google's John Mueller provides SEO support in the new year

John Mueller, Senior Search Analyst and Head of Google’s Search Relations team, was there again on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, providing SEO assistance to site owners, creators , publishers, SEO and others. He has done it for Christmas every year and also for New Years every year.

He has been doing it year after year for over 16 years.

John has a tradition of helping webmasters at both New Years and Christmas. He did New Years 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019 too, and he’s done it year after year before. It did so at Christmas 2020 and 2019 and in 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008 and 2007.

He posted responses to several threads on Reddit over the New Year’s holiday, here are a few with his responses:

Please help! Website copied : The DMCA process is commonly used in cases like this.
The video is not the main content of the GSC page : Feel free to send me some URLs if you want me to forward them to the team.
Why not buy Fiverr service for DR and DA 50? : Oh, I thought you said these weren’t really sites :-)). Sorry, just trolling :-). I hope things are going well for you outside of Reddit.
A 4xx broken link error in Semrush : Just ignore it. It’s normal for pages to go up and down on the web, and using the HTTP 404/410 status code for them (essentially just clearing the page) is the standards-compliant way to do it. If you change the name of a page, use a redirect. If the page is gone, leave it. Any site of non-trivial size will have hundreds, thousands, millions of 4xx errors in their logs.
External links pointing to partially encoded versions of URLs : I’ve set up redirects for accidental typos in the links, but I doubt you’d see any SEO effect. It could theoretically make sense if it’s a really important or traffic-generating link, but if that’s the case, they’d just fix the link (either on their own, based on user feedback, or your feedback) . ). This leaves random links being dropped in random places; these will have no recognizable effects. Fixing them (via a redirect on your end) feels good, but that’s about it.
How does Google track location? : Do you mean your server? ccTLD is a good differentiator, if you want to target a specific country. If you just want to be a global site, use a gTLD. Some TLDs look country-specific, but aren’t (check, for example, “.nyc” is not a ccTLD, it’s a gTLD), and some country code TLDs are seen as gTLDs.
Keyword domain name : If you plan to use this long term, I wouldn’t recommend using just one keyword domain name. It makes it weird to start targeting other terms and makes it almost impossible for people to find you by your name. A keyword domain name will not give you any recognizable SEO advantage in Google.
The URL inspector cannot retrieve the page after DNS repointing : This is probably just the old IP address being used, the DNS cache will clear over time. I like to set my DNS “TTL” (how long the DNS cache can last) low when I make a move to make the switch faster. Some people keep the old server running for a day, which also works, depending on whether it’s a static site or not.
Why am I suddenly getting a lot of referral traffic from a scam looking website with no traffic? : I would just filter or block it on whatever you use to track it.
0.7 DR Website and keeps going down : To be blunt, just publishing blog posts will not impress search engines, even if the posts are good. Assuming the tool you’re working on is doing something unique that no other tool is doing, you’d focus your time on that. Make something great that others want to use, that others want to talk about, that others want to promote on your own. Don’t just write blog posts for the sake of writing another blog post.