Today is January 6th, 2022 and today I’ll be talking about IndexNow from Microsoft, a couple domain related questions answered by John Mueller during his “ask googlebot” video from yesterday, a thought provoking local SEO article by Mirriam Ellis at Moz, and finally Disney is getting into the metaverse. Microsoft Webmaster Tools released their IndexNow WordPress plugin over the holiday weekend. https://searchengineland.com/indexnow-plugin-for-wordpress-378228 Ask GoogleBot - Domains Lightning Round From January 5th 2022. Does Google care about tld?For example a real estate agent might want jimsmith.realtor instead of jimsmithrealtor.com. Google says they don’t care, it’s treated the same. https://youtu.be/9ERB7gJV7o8?list=PLKoqnv2vTMUM9wKeb-Gvm8bgpFM72yiXw&t=16 Can I rank globally for a domain with a ccTLD. The example was using .fr and you are a French site, but you want to target Brazil as well. In Search console, you can only setup one Country to target. Once you remove that, you are no longer targeting a single country. Also, having a ccTLD send a signal to Google and tells it which country you are targeting. https://youtu.be/9ERB7gJV7o8?list=PLKoqnv2vTMUM9wKeb-Gvm8bgpFM72yiXw&t=80 Miriam Ellis puts together another great article over at Moz - this is giving me whiteboard Friday feels. The article talks about 2022 Local SEO success. There were a few really great takeaways as I read the article and I encourage you to take 5 or 6 minutes and read it all the way through. But what I liked most was the talk about supply chain gaps and how you couldn’t buy name brand anti-bacterial, but then your local brewer started making them. How you couldn’t buy masks but there were teams of Etsy sewists. Did you Google making your own bread or where to buy flour locally? The savvy business owners came up with new solutions. https://moz.com/blog/2022-local-seo-success And a few days ago we talked about Reddit’s homepage getting taken down a notch from a DMCA request. To follow up with that, a Reddit thread by user dustyd22 discussed a site that is copying their site word for word and just adding a “the” in front of the domain name. A quick response links to Google’s content removal form. https://www.reddit.com/r/TechSEO/comments/rwvaqi/website_duplication_by_a_competitor/ https://support.google.com/legal/troubleshooter/1114905?hl=en Disney has entered the metaverse. Remember yesterday’s news where I talked about Nike the perfect Corp entering the metaverse. Well, Disney has just entered and they’re looking to make it big. IGN has an article on this, outlining the several patents that Disney just filed on An Augmented Virtual World Simulator That Doesn't Need a Headset Or Glasses. https://www.ign.com/articles/disney-patent-augmented-reality-theme-park-rides