Just like on every Christmas, John Mueller from Google dials up to the internet and logs on to the support channels on New Years and helps out folks in the Google Webmaster support and social media channels. He has done it year after year on New Years and this year, on the first day of 2020, is no different.

He did last year also, and has done it year after year prior to that.

For webmasters, SEOs, site owners, etc to be posting concerns on New Years - they have to be in some distress. John gets that and he does what he can to respond to those questions during those times of distress.

Here are some, not all, of the posts and responses he made on New Years 2020.

Someone had a security issue, similar to the uncommon downloads we recently covered, and he posted in the Google Webmaster Help thread with advice. He wrote:

Is it possible the the message was for "uncommon downloads"? This can happen with download-sites, especially if the download files are changing frequently. If you're generating personalized downloads (eg, with a session-hash included), that might be something to reconsider. Otherwise, I'd recommend just going through the review process (which it looks like you already did). Uncommon downloads are downloads that our systems haven't been able to check yet, and so they're flagged accordingly in Chrome when downloaded. It only affects specific downloads, it doesn't affect the rest of your website, and it doesn't affect search visibility of your website. Over time, as the files become more ... common .. the warning would go away automatically since the files will have been reviewed. As I mentioned above, you can also request review yourself to speed that up. In practice, I wouldn't get too alarmed by this in Search Console -- just request review, and unless things come back as reviewed & bad, you don't have to do anything special.

He also posted responses on Twitter:

You can disown any outgoing link from your website by simply removing it from your website :) — 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) January 1, 2020

It's easy to try out, if you have both :). With things like this, where both variations can make sense, there's usually not one single clear approach that would make everyone happy. — 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) January 1, 2020

So you're saying I should take more selfies with myself? — 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) January 1, 2020

There is more, but this is just a sampling.

Thank you John and the whole Google team for what you all do for the SEO and webmaster community. We appreciate it and happy, healthy and successful 2020!

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.