I spotted this thread on Mastodon where both John Mueller and Danny Sullivan of Google was helping internet legend Tim Bray with some SEO issues he was having with Google Search. Yes, he got two Googlers helping him, which is rare, but has happened before.

Tim Bray is famous, well, internet famous, he has a Wikipedia entry that reads, “Timothy William Bray (born June 21, 1955) is a Canadian software developer, environmentalist, political activist and one of the co-authors of the original XML specification. He worked for Amazon Web Services from December 2014 until May 2020 when he quit due to concerns over the terminating of whistleblowers. Previously he has been employed by Google, Sun Microsystems and Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Bray has also founded or co-founded several start-ups such as Antarctica Systems.”

So when someone internet famous complains about Google – Google notices, well, I think Danny Sullivan at least notices.

Tim wrote:

So Danny and John stepped in to help with some SEO issues with the site and also saying they will send the feedback to the right teams at Google Search.

Danny first came in and noticed it and wrote, “If you have an example you want to share in the future, happy to look. That’s different from us not having indexed a page — @timbray I see @johnmu gave you a reply on what might be tripping us up in this case”

John then dug in a bit and found some issues, he said:

He then had a bit of a back and forth on some SEO questions with Tim, all useful for us to review as well. Here are some of those responses:

Danny also answered some general questions about how Google Search works in that thread:

I do believe when someone who is internet famous, is followed more and respected more online, complains about Google Search, it does get Google’s attention more than a normal person. But at the same time, it makes sense, because others also follow them more and Google, at least from a PR perspective, wants to jump on those concerns before someone like me writes it up. Plus, I think Danny just follows Tim, so he probably saw it that way anyway.

But yes, being internet famous doesn’t hurt when it comes to getting support from Google with SEO questions. It doesn’t mean Google will press a button to magically make Tim’s site rank better, by the way…

Forum discussion at Mastodon.

Update: Tim confirmed the changes implemented fixed the issue. He said on Mastodon, “Yay, it’s fixed, as of now. Everything in my blog back to 2003 seems to be fully searchable. Thanks once again for the help. I updated the blog piece and will post here and on Twitter.”