The keen-eyed amongst you may have noticed a certain penchant here at Distilled for blogging on the subject of mobile search. In this interview, we were lucky enough to speak to Thomas Roberts, co-founder of The Texperts, an award winning text-based Internet answering service that leads the field in human powered mobile search.

For those of you who think you’ve seen the name ‘Texperts’ somewhere on this blog before, you’d be right: it was one of the options listed in Will’s recent post on the possible future of mobile search.

We caught up with Thomas earlier today to have a chat about mobile search, geo-location and his mum.

So Thomas, tell us a bit about the basics…

[Thomas]: Well, we’ve been going for about four years now and the service, in its simplest form, answers questions asked via text message. However, it gets a lot more complicated once you look at the actual delivery of this. There are a lot of systems in place to make the process more efficient and cost-effective; in service terms, we have an expertise in finding answers.

There are about 250 Texperts. The majority of these work from home in the UK, but we have several employees in South Africa, Canada and the US. Demand for these jobs is high. The Tex-factor Challenge is part of our recruitment process and only 2% of those who take the test pass and can then be considered for work.

Thomas tells us that the Texperts make themselves experts by using the best possible resources out there. For example, they have negotiated a relationship with Guinness World Records which gives them full access to the whole database. Normal users only get a fraction of this and the books themselves only contain about 5% of the total records. Obviously, there’s some pretty random stuff on there, but then they get asked some random questions!

This kind of categorised searching is apparently really important; Thomas estimates that only about 10% of texperts’ searches go through google. Each question is slotted into one of about 100 categories and each of these is kitted out with a range of vertical search engines, which are then presented to the Texpert as the best place to start finding an answer.

Do you ever use, for example, wikipedia as a source?

Our current thinking on wikipedia is that it’s a great place to start searching for the right place to search, if you see what I mean…. Obviously, because it’s user generated, we don’t use it as a reliable source. If a situation arises where the only information we can find is unreliable, then we’ll say so in the answer.

This is a rule used across the board with unreliable sources. If a question asks, for example, ‘Is it true that Paris Hilton has a new boyfriend?’, then the Texperts might reply with something like ‘We can’t be sure, but according to a few unverified sources online, Paris was getting cosy with a certain Benji Madden’. Thomas emphasises how transparent the whole search process is. Users can log-in online at any point and see exactly where their previous answers came from.

Ok, so you can compete on an information level, but how do you shape up against the search engines?

Our service does not compete (or attempt to compete) with the experience of searching at your desktop computer. Primarily, it’s a service for people who are busy doing something else at the same time as needing the information, like trying to get somewhere or socialising with friends in the pub. Speed-wise, if you were sitting in front of google and asked for a definition or something then, yes, you’re going to beat the Texperts. But, in my experience, when I’m out and about, I’ll nearly always get a quicker service from the Texperts than I would from a mobile search.

Similarly, phones that have a bearable level of multimedia browsing suit another purpose. If you’re rushing to the airport and need to find the right terminal, you’re probably not going to have the time to search on your phone, however fancy it is. You’d use your iphone if you were sitting in a waiting room with time to spare.

Thomas tells us about Google’s SMS service (only available in the US), which can answer simple queries like ‘pizza in new york’. This sort of question would probably deliver some addresses and phone numbers, much like the first results in a desktop search might. However, the difference between this kind of response and texpert answers is that the Google SMS doesn’t offer any kind of qualitative element. If the Texperts are asked about pizzas in New York, they will provide information on the best pizza that they can find- the best value, best quality, best location.

And I suppose, thrown into this, is the problem (or rather the advantage for you guys) that a lot of people just don’t know how to search?

Yeah, absolutely. My mum is a classic example of this. She’s perfectly capable of using the Internet and does so regularly. But if she wants to find a good hotel in Paris then she will simply type ‘Paris hotel’ into google and, as a result, have nothing very reliable to go on. In contrast, asking the Texperts this kind of question will deliver a response in about five minutes and would give a really useful answer.

We got a bit side-tracked here…. Generally speaking, people are bad at searching aren’t they? We decided that, for a lot of people with a query, even if they’re sitting in front of a ready-to-go search page on the computer, they would be a lot better simply using a service like the Texperts rather than trying to find the information themselves. They are the experts, after all.

To go back to mobile search, how do you intend to protect your company and your revenue stream as your users become more and more accustomed to having free mobile internet at their fingertips?

Interestingly, a lot of our best users are the ‘early adopters’- ie. the sort of people who would buy an iphone and use mobile browsing. We figure this happens because they’re the kind of crowd who are willing to pay for something that works well. In our eyes (and theirs presumably), the cost for the relevancy and timeliness of the information is justified.

We actually see phones like the iphone as an opportunity for us to give an even richer answer. For example, it might be possible to send an image of that hotel in Paris along with the reply.

Have you considered the possibility of running a free ad-supported model to compete with free wireless internet mindset?

The possibilities presented by ad revenue are something we’re keen to understand, and we intend to keep a close eye on its progress elsewhere in the field. Having said that, objectivity is really important to us. As soon as the user feels they’re being sold something in their answer then trust is lost.

We take this conversation a step further and discuss how, despite this trust issue, an ad that’s really relevant and comes in response to an action by the user (rather than out of the blue), can be well received.

In Thomas’ words:

Pull rather than push marketing is far more important in mobile search. People don’t want to be bothered with needless information when they haven’t asked for it but are far more likely to be ok with it if they’ve already asked for relevant information.

For example, if someone was to text in asking for the nearest Borders, the Texperts might text back saying ‘your closest Borders is here but Waterstones is closer and if you take this message in you’ll get 10% off’. We agree that that sort of thing might conceivably have a future as it offers an opportunity for some highly targeted advertising.

In the same vein, would you ever consider paid listings? In other words, could a hotel pay to be recommended by you?

We don’t accept paid listings. If a hotel wants to be recommended by us then it has to be the best possible solution to our user’s query. If it has good reviews and is good value for money etc, then it might make it on to one of the vertical search engines that we regularly use.

In your opinion, would it be worth these hotels aiming for a spot on those search engines. Can you give us any idea of search volume?

Obviously, I can’t give you exact numbers, but we’re in the hundreds of thousands per month now.

So yes, it probably is worth making sure you’ve got a few positive and prominent reviews out there. We go on to discuss how, for every one of these questions that concerns a location, an optional link to a map is sent with the answer. It’s surprising how popular this service is: according to Thomas, it results in an uptake 10 times the industry standard for paid extras. He reasons this is partly because the link takes you straight to the right map, rather than anything more complicated.

One of the other things we’re really interested in (as well as mobile search) is geo-location and the issues surrounding it.

Yeah, it interests us too. When we were starting up the business, we did actually think about buying the technology (that’s already available) that would allow us to know a mobile’s location, but it was quite an expensive process and there were of course the privacy issues surrounding it…

So do you not get a lot of questions asking for information about the user’s location, with them sort of assuming that you’ll know where they are?

Actually, no, not really. We had the same concerns when we were starting out but it’s really not an issue. It’s interesting how the majority of questions on that theme ask about a location that’s going to be visited in the future. It’s much more rare to be asked stuff about where the user is right now.

Thomas explains that the person texting in is usually very understanding when asked to confirm his location. This means that geo-location is not a high priority for the Texperts as, when necessary, it can simply be asked for. This surprises us at Distilled; we were expecting the same sort of issues that the search engines are dealing with at the moment to come up.

Let’s talk a bit about the future. Where do you see your biggest threats coming from? Algorithms or competing companies, or something else we haven’t thought of?!

There’s no way algorithms can compete with us. Rather, we see them helping us to push the cost of the service down and make it more efficient. We already use a few clever algorithms to answer some of the most straightforward questions.

In term of other threats, it’s a tough call. The company is still relatively small and this area of business is very much starting to have its day. This means it’s a really exciting space but that also, potentially, there’s a lot of money that could compete with us.

Just to wrap up… Obviously, we’re really interested in your ‘online’ presence. How do you integrate your ‘offline’ mobile searching and your online brand?

As you may know, we had a big re-brand over the summer so we did, and still do, quite a lot of advertising offline. But our website is still important. Our users can sign up to the website, buy credits and, as mentioned, check their question and answer history. We’ve got a few plans on how we want to develop this. One of them is to provide the opportunity for users to feedback on the answers they receive. They can already do this via text, but people are far less likely to do this with their mobile than they are while at a computer.

Thomas went on to explain some further perks of the website.

Our blogs are really popular. Because we have such a huge volume of information passing through our systems, both from the users and their niches, and from the various vertical searches our Texperts use, we really know what the zeitgeist is, we know what people are interested in right now.

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Just to end by saying thanks to Thomas. We were on the phone for nearly an hour and I hope you’ll find the topics covered as interesting as we did!

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Today the BBC site launches their new homepage and my initial reaction was to wonder if suddenly they might pose a mighty big threat to Google? Bear with me a second while I ramble on about a few things:

The New BBC Homepage

Click on the thumbnail to the right or go and set your own up. Looks pretty doesn’t it?

It’s pretty slick, loads fast and has lots of rich content on the page. My homepage has been Google.co.uk since forever but looking at this almost makes me want to set the BBC page as my homepage. If the search box did something other than search the BBC site (more on this later) I might even switch. Shocking right?! I think I need a lie down.

OK, I’m feeling better now but I’m still impressed by the BBC homepage – not only does it work well, it offers me a huge amount of quality content right there on the page – news, radio, video, pictures. Pretty orange colours. Everything.

So this is a competitor of the Google iGoogle homepage right? Well kind of, I actually think it goes one step further.

The signal to noise ratio has always been a big problem for the internet, that’s what Google does after all – it aims to sift through all the noise to find you some signal. But the BBC homepage goes one step further – it doesn’t find you signal (more on that later), it provides you with signal – between BBC News, BBC Radio, BBC TV you have a large portion of what you need. Talking of video….

iPlayer

In case you’ve had your head buried under the sand (or in case you’re not based in the UK) the BBC iPlayer is a service which allows you to watch any BBC show up to 7 days after it’s broadcast on TV for free online. To be honest I watch very little TV online or offline (other than Family Guy, which incidentally isn’t available through the iplayer for obvious reaonss) so I haven’t been that bothered about the iplayer. Having spent a little time browsing around though I’m incredibly impressed by the quality of the videos and the ease of use of the site. It’s pretty slick and for certain comedy shows it’s going to be much easier to catch them through the iplayer than trying to watch them on TV. (Note: for any US readers we don’t really have Tivo over here so there isn’t the same culture of just recording stuff left right and centre and watching at our leisure.)

Sure, there’s a couple of issues with the service which really should have been fixed by now in my opinion. The URLs are nasty which is pretty annoying and I think stops the shows spreading as easily as they might through facebook, forums and the like. Taking off a load of tracking code crap which gets automatically appended to the URL you’re left with something like this for a particular show URL:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/page/item/b008ysrg.shtml

Wouldn’t it be handy if you could see which show it was from the URL? Also – since these URLs expire after 7 days, wouldn’t it be handy to have the date in the URL? People would very quickly learn to understand if a BBC iplayer link was still ‘live’ or not.

My second gripe with the iplayer is the lack of RSS feeds. What godly reason is there for not allowing me to subscribe to shows I want to watch via RSS? Seriously that one change would convert me from a ‘that’s nice’ attitude to a ‘use it regularly’ attitude.

As this service gets better and expands this competes with youtube at least on some level.

BBC Search

Wait, you cry – the BBC isn’t a search engine – how can it be a competitor? Well listen closely amigo. Have you tried searching through the BBC site recently? Sure, often the first thing that’s returned is an internal BBC site search but if you narrow the search to the WWW then what do you get?

The answer to this question isn’t clear. The best I could do was find this article from 2005 which showed that under the hood the results were Yahoo-driven but with some tweaks to the algorithm.

Regardless of who powers the results, they’re different from any of the big 4 (Google, Yahoo, Live, Ask) so there’s certainly something going on that’s unique. Of course that’s not all – instead of adverts you get editorialy chosen links. Yipes – a blend of hand-edited search results combined with an algorithm to back them up? Sounds formidable.

Here’s the BBC’s own words on their search results.

Conclusion

So what am I driving at? What I’m saying is that while still inferior in many ways to Google, in the UK the BBC could easily position itself as the defacto homepage to start your browsing and that actually a lot of that browsing will stay on the BBC site. This hurts Google straight off the bat. But combine that with some forward thinking, have the BBC develop their own algorithm (or partner properly with Microhoo!) and position the search box on the BBC homepage as a web search not a BBC search and suddenly you have a search engine capable of taking on Google.

The sheer weight of the BBC brand in the UK (and in fact worldwide) means that they would be trusted overnight. A small amount of branding and positioning for this service and I think the BBC could easily become the second biggest search engine in the UK. That’s not something to be sniffed at!

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Duncan and I arrived at San Francisco airport yesterday lunchtime (PST) after a 10 hour flight. By 4pm we were in the bar, and a great night followed despite the fact we had been up for about 28 hours by the end of it.

When we arrived at the hotel in Santa Clara, we were amused to see the sign that greeted us to a ‘SCO, PPC and internet marketing’ conference.

So far, we’re having a great time and meeting / catching up with loads of fun people (more about that later) and the only downside is the body-clock timezone that made it seem like a good idea to get up at 5.30am after about 4 hours’ sleep in the last 2 days…

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Hitwise, a well-known company that monitors Internet use, has a description on its website of how the UK search engine market share is divided up. Google predictably reigns with its omnipotent 90%-ish share of online search; it is further down the ranks that the real contest kicks in. So, with the top-dog slot firmly taken, where do the other engines rank? If Google is the Great Dane of the search engine world, who is the Saint Bernard and who is the Chihauhau?

Well, according to Hitwise, the UK market is divided like this:

Google	google.com and google.co.uk	88.22%
Ask	uk.ask.com	3.05%
Yahoo	uk.search.yahoo.com	2.18%

I’ve combined the .com and .co.uk google here, and it is worth noting that both the Ask and Yahoo engines are the UK versions.

Hit-not-so-wise?

This data seemed a little odd to us here at Distilled so we decided to do our own mini-poll using a few of our clients. On average, google got the expected 80-90 % market share, but the other results differed widely from those listed on Hitwise.

Search engines	Client 1	Client 2	Client 3
Google	82.07%	87.5%	94.02%
Yahoo	7.75%	6.25%	3.1%
Live	3.68%	-	0.87%
MSN	3.06%	-	0.72%
AOL	1.49%	-	0.58%
Ask	0.95%	- *	0.72%

*There was too little search volume for this client on these search engines for Analytics to report.

The next highest average award went easily to Yahoo (although Analytics does not differentiate between the UK and .com version) with a comfortable 5.7% of the market share. Compared to this, Ask had a paltry average of 0.57%. Not only this, it is soundly outdone by Live (an average of 2.75 %), MSN (an average of 1.89 %) and AOL (an average of 1.04 %). As a quick aside, I have chosen to keep MSN and Live separate because, unlike google.com and google.co.uk, there is much more likelihood of a user consciously and consistently choosing between versions.

Now, it’s true that Hitwise used a much wider comparison base than we did and we are by no means implying that their data is incorrect (or unwise!), but it is difficult to explain how these results could somersault so dramatically.

Ask a lot of questions

According to all the analytics stats that we can get our hands on we have not seen referral traffic in the 3% range for Ask for a good few years now. A quick brainstorm later and we aren’t much wiser. The only possible explanation we came up with that didn’t rely on hitwise having dodgy data was the fact that Ask, more than any other engine, encourages you to refine or expand your search. It’d be great to see stats on how many people don’t get the exact results they want first time round and, rather than choosing another keyword, use a suggestion that Ask comes up with. That would effectively mean that although the number of unique searches on Ask is fewer, the search volume is increased by the number of times each search is ‘refined’. Could the difference between the hitwise data and what we see be simply down to people refining their searches?

In my opinion it seems unlikely, and it relies on the hitwise data coming from a ‘number of searches made’ rather than ‘number of URL’s hit’ point of view, but that’s us out of ideas I’m afraid. Does anyone else know of any reason why the Ask numbers seem inflated, or is it just that our numbers are wrong?

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Dear Lovefilm,

Thank you for adding the new feature which allows me to create a profile page on your site. I really like these kinds of features on websites as I love talking about myself (I even google myself from time to time).

The only problem with your service is that the profile pages which are generated aren’t very search engine friendly (although to be fair the rest of your site could do with a little help from some SEO experts. If you’re reading why not give us a call? ).

The first thing which upsets me is that I’m not allowed to have a user name with hyphens or underscores in. How am I supposed to rank for two word queries without that!? Ok, I thought, never mind I can just drop lots of links to the page to get it ranking. Well I could but frankly since the title tag is generic (“LOVEFiLM | Europe’s No.1 online DVD rental service“) I’m not sure it’s going to be worth it! I mean sure, Lovefilm may be ‘Europe’s No 1 online DVD rental service’, but is my profile page ‘Europe’s No 1 online DVD rental service’? I suspect not.

So basically, how am I supposed to spam my search results when you make the pages so SEO-unfriendly?!

Your Sincerely,

Tom Critchlow

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I’m getting a little bored of blowing our own trumpet about this, but it would be daft not to link to them.

We’re in a great feature in the Sunday Times written by Rosie Millard entitled Help! A net imposter is ruining me.

We also make a cameo appearance in a Sunday Mirror article entitled Has Kate cleaned up her drugs past on Google? (I never thought I’d appear alongside Kate Moss in another article). That one is a bit more hyperbolic and makes it sound like we might have ‘done’ Kate Moss (so to speak). For the record, we didn’t.

If you have arrived here because of these stories, you might be interested in our new DIY guide to online reputation management that you can buy online for £150 inc. VAT.

PS how come mainstream media never links to you? That’s the subject for a rant another day…

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I’ve been writing a lot about mobile stuff recently – I think it’s just been on my mind a lot. With revelations like 50x more iPhone search volume than from any other handset, however, I think we might be hearing more about mobile search from everyone in our industry.

At least it provides a little signal in among the noise about The Sunday Times on the blog recently!

A search marketer’s take on m. versus .mobi

Much has already been written on the m. versus .mobi debate including interesting stuff from the perspective of a domainer.

For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, the discussion is around the best way of differentiating mobile internet content. On the one hand, ICANN has released the .mobi top-level extension (e.g. amazon.mobi etc.). On the other hand, there is a growing adoption of m. sub-domains – m.example.com e.g. m.facebook.com m.bloglines.com (and we are seeing a lot more iphone sub-domains which are designed for a smaller screen but include a lot more interactivity than regular mobile content – I suspect this will be a short-lived phenomenon with the iPhone coping perfectly well with the regular web – and falling back on the mobile web if needed).

There is a third viewpoint in this debate which is worth bringing up which is that the mobile web shouldn’t be anything different to the regular web. Exponents of this view think that the answer is technology that makes the experience better on a mobile device (typically small screen, fiddly input). Couple this with the big, bad world of the www and you have a recipe for fun. I’m not going to address this part of the argument in depth in this post – that’s for another day (in brief, my view is that there are certain tasks which are particularly well-suited to mobile and for which you want a site optimised for that experience, though I agree that technology will bridge this gap to a large degree I don’t think everyone wants an iPhone in their pocket – many will want a micro-handset that lets them get online just enough to check train times etc.).

Incidentally, whenever you are reading about mobile internet (whether on our blog or elsewhere), the mobile emulator at mtld.mobi enables you to replicate the mobile experience inside your regular browser – handy both for checking your own sites and researching the marketplace.

Pros of .mobi versus m.

The benefits of .mobi as I see them (with a particularly SEO hat on) are:

• A .mobi domain has to be a strong indicator of relevance for a mobile search. I am going to write more about mobile search ranking factors soon, but this has to be a good one
• They look good in mobile search results – whenever you do a search from your handset and see a .mobi, you immediately know they have a site designed for you (unfortunately, sometimes, the .mobi is all you need to rank in Google mobile at the moment which was a bit of a disappointment when I went to train-times.mobi as, at the time of writing, it ranks in Google mobile, but doesn’t actually offer any train times!)
• Domain prices in the secondary market are cheaper than .com and .co.uk at the moment (and there are a lot of decent ones left on the primary market)

Cons of .mobi versus m.

It’s not all smelling of roses for the .mobi, though, here are the cons as I see them:

• It’s a new domain and is going to get none of the domain-weight of your main domain(s) whereas sub-domains (handled well, sometimes) gain some of the trust of the main domain (it remains to be seen how important this is for mobile search)
• It’s a stupid extension to type on a small keyboard – particularly a non-qwerty numerical keypad where m and o share a key. Why on earth didn’t they pick .m?
• It’s not .com or country-code tld (e.g. .co.uk) which still means you have an uphill branding struggle (see .biz, .eu, .travel (who thought that was a good idea?) etc.)
• It’s possible to share first party cookies with the main site if your mobile site is on a sub-domain – this is useful for enabling people to navigate between the mobile and regular sites while staying signed-in (particularly likely on high-spec devices like the iPhone)
• The brand stays stronger with a sub-domain – it is easier to reap the rewards of all your regular advertising if people remember your primary domain and know they just have to put ‘m.’ on the beginning to get the mobile version
• You only get one for the whole world! This isn’t a problem (assuming you can get hold of your branded domain name) if you only operate in one country, but if you operate worldwide, it’s quite restricting – many big sites use their tld to distinguish content for different countries (amazon.co.uk is a different site to amazon.com which is a different site to amazon.fr etc.) whereas there is only one .mobi for each domain (e.g. amazon.mobi) whereas m.example.com, m.example.co.uk, m.example.fr would work fine to distinguish mobile versions for different countries

To expand a little on that last point, you can auto-detect surfers’ countries very reliably when they are browing by mobile, and you can then auto-serve them different content based on their location. This is technically cloaking, but anyway is unlikely to achieve the desired result since the search engines don’t crawl from every country looking for the different forms of your content.

So what is the right answer?

My view is that you should have both (assuming you can get your hands on the .mobi) and then the best practice depends on your situation:

• Established multi-national company with nothing executed for mobile yet: use m.primarydomain.tld in each country you serve. Have example.mobi conditionally redirect to the appropriate m.example.tld based on surfer’s country
• Established single country company: as above (based on the strength of your existing domain) but with .mobi simply redirecting to m.yourdomain.tld
• Start-up (non-mobile specific): concentrate on building your main domain and use m. for mobile (with .mobi redirecting to it) (unless .mobi works so well in mobile SEO that you just have to have it – we’re all waiting for mobile ranking factors – I’ll try to get that started soon!).
• Start-up (mobile specific): consider .mobi for branding purposes – otherwise the same as for any other start-up

That is not to say you should necessarily move to this configuration if you have started down another route. Care needs to be taken whenever you move content around between domains and sub-domains. Use your judgment and care. Your mileage may vary. Etc.

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We have just put together a blog for Rosie Millard, a journalist with the Sunday Times who is writing an article about online reputation management. We met up with Rosie this morning when she came to our office to pick our brains.

We are looking forward to reading what Rosie writes this Sunday and assuming we don’t say anything stupid we will let you know!

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This post is going to be the first of many talking about geo location and internationalisation^* of search results. To start I thought we would take a look at the problems the search engines have trying to ensure they return the most relevant results for any search you throw at them.

^* My spell check just pointed out that I should spell internationalisation with a z, it made me giggle. Its like that ‘joke’ about why dyslexia is so hard to spell

Living and working in the UK and speaking English, alongside a large percentage of the online world means we are sheltered from the some of the issues that the search engines face to do with language.

It still surprises me when I see results that include multiple languages. I’m very jealous of the small number of people who are truly multi lingual, but ignoring that small subset of people, there is no possible reason (apart from covering all your bases) that returning results in multiple languages is a good idea.

Results must be in the right language

The quest to return the most relevant results to any query starts by trying to understand the keyphrase the search has chosen. For the search engines to return a relevant set of web pages the search engine must first work out what language the user is searching in, and secondly try to only return results that match that language. Determining what language the resulting pages should be in has a number of problems:

1. The keyphrase used may not give away what language the searcher speaks. Consider a search for ‘php’, what language is that in, English, Dutch or perhaps Italian? Interestingly the italian search returns the main php website (in English) as the number 1 result. Not a great user experience if you are Italian and don’t speak English.
2. You can’t rely on the tld of the search engine you are using. I could be on holiday in italy with the default engine being google.it, yet I still want my english search to return english results.
3. You can’t rely on the location of the computer, just because someone is searching from france doesn’t mean they speak french.

Tips to Identify what language you are speaking

Google tends to be pretty good at working out the language of a given page, but as with most things in this industry the belt and braces approach is often best, and taking these few small steps can help ensure that your pages are having the language correctly identified.

1. Include a language tag in the html. You can do this by amending the <html> tag. This article on Dive into accessibililty will explain more.
2. Ensure each page only has writing in one language on it.
3. If you want to have multiple languages for your website either split them into different domains (which allows you to have relevant tlds), or group the language by folder, eg apple.com/fr. Watch this space for more detailed discussion about whether you want a single domain or multiple domains to hold the different languages you have.

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I’ve written about how squeaky-clean my online reputation is before. Unfortunately, Will’s search results are a bit less impressive. While there’s nothing negative there it’s a bit cluttered. Time to change that!

Will Critchlow is obviously the well known search marketer and director of Distilled. Phew, one down.

It’s a less known fact that Will Critchlow has a facebook page. 2 down!

Of course, it would be strange to talk about Will and reputation management without linking to his quote in the Sunday Times article.

Now that those are out of the way – a couple of cool web pages which feature Will are:

Rand’s search engine ranking factors referenced “37 leaders in the world of organic search engine optimization” of which Will Critchlow is one!

Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim covered Reputation Monitor and mentioned Will a couple of times.

Hopefully that’ll tidy things up a little bit! For anyone who was looking for real content, sorry! There’ll be more of that soon

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