Good morning!

I Just wanted to update you all on the wonderful new feature over at Facebook- Facebook Places.

Facebook Places clearly has potential- massive user base, loads of opportunity for geo-targeted specials (as has been masterfully created by Foursquare, Gowalla and other products).

However, as has been a growing concern for many users, there are lots of potential risks and privacy concerns. That which follows is my own opinion and more than likely does not reflect anyone elses concerns. The usual disclaimer applies.

1. The Default Settings

As I made quite clear in my argument with Paddy I am not a big fan of implied consent when it comes to advertising, privacy and targeting. Similarly, I am not a big fan of implied consent when it comes to my location and the ability of others to publicly announce where I am at present. And we all know of some of my existing concerns with Facebook.

Take a look at the default settings of Places within the privacy settings on Facebook. Please note that I have not changed anything with regards to Places.

Take note that the user is automatically included in the “people here now” section- visible to anyone nearby. Perfect for that restraining order I’ve just got against my crazy ex-girlfriend!

[Edit: It's been brought to my attention that the default setting is somewhat dependent on the level of security settings you have previously enabled. Thanks to @RichardShove for this! Either way- be sure to check your settings!]

2. “Allow Friends to Check me In”

I’m not too sure what the default for this one is- as it seems to be neither enabled or disabled. Judging by the above and other countless examples of Facebook privacy issues I would venture a guess that the implied consent rule holds and the default would be that others (your “friends”) are allowed to check you in.

Again, probably not the end of the world if you trust your friends but it can be a real doozy. I’m sure Eric Schmidt and the Google team would probably say something to the effect of “anonymity is dead, blah blah blah” and “don’t do bad things and no one will know” and so forth, but this takes control right off the table. It’s bad enough that my friends might call me out and check me in to the local karaoke joint when I’m there but it’s far worse to consider that they could check me into “The Golden Banana” in the greater Boston area whilst I’m still living in London!

And given the number of young people on Facebook, this will defintiely be an issue. Maturity is not a universal trait.

3. If enough people check into a place it becomes “public”

Here’s another cause for concern. If someone wants to, they can create a “Place” for my home. If enough people check-in here it becomes public. Well, if any of you remember the hilarity and awfulness that came of Corey Delaney and his parents being out of town, it’s fair enough to assume that a “small gathering” could quickly turn into a flashmob, riot, or epic house party… with loads of uninvited guests.

There are a couple takeaways/thoughts from all of this.

The first of which is: you should probably trust your friends- if you’re willing to call them your friends on Facebook you should probably know them well enough to assume they won’t sabotage your reputation online. If not, it may be time for a “friends clean-up” on the old Facebook account.

The second is that you can disable a number of these features simply by adjusting your privacy settings in your Facebook. I don’t mean to raise conspiracy theories here or make a huge stink because you can opt-out.

The third of which is: hold on to your hats if you’re not big on your Twitter stream and News stream (on Facebook) being clogged with folks who have gone a bit trigger happy with Foursquare… things are about to get a whole lot worse.

All that’s left is to wait and see if this can be harnessed and become another masterstroke to help Facebook compete with Foursquare and the like- or whether it’s enough to push some users over the edge.

Let us know what you think!

Please feel free to sound off in the comments and let us know how you’re feeling about Places. Are you excited? Worried? Think I am too paranoid for my own good? Feel free to let us know

Being a good SEO involves research. You need to be constantly pushing the envelope on the data that you gather, the insights that you gain and what recommendations you provide in terms of what works and what doesn’t. Google Local is a particular area that I’ve been investigating recently both for clients and because I’m an SEO geek. I’ve found some interesting thing and some not-so-interesting things. Having done my own analysis however I thought it would be useful to make some data available to the SEO community as a whole, the data below is in a Google Docs and is freely accessible. I’d love to kick-start a discussion about the data and to hear other SEOs analysis and feedback!

Before I dive into the data and the analysis, here’s a quick primer on Google Local:

• David Mihm’s Local Ranking factors
• What is a citation anyway?
• Mike Blumenthal’s local ranking factors presentation

What’s In The Data?

Here’s an iframe embed of the data to get a quick feel for what you get. Contained in the full spreadsheet is Google Local data for a particular search phrase “Hotels in Seattle”.

• Summary – The summary information which contains the hotels which rank for the phrase. The top 7 are the ones that I see in the Google Local one-box. The remaining 13 are the ones which rank once you click on the map to explore Google Local rankings. The data contained includes the number of reviews, the number of citations and the distance to the centre of Seattle for each hotel.
• Sheet 1-20 – These sheets list the complete individual citation list for the relevant hotel. So for the edgewater hotel which ranks 4th we click on sheet 4 and see the full list of citations for that hotel.

Download the Data (as xls)

The above download is in XLS format, please email me or twitter me or leave a comment if you’d like the data in some other format. The link to the Google Docs file is here in case that’s easier for people.

My Own Analysis

I don’t claim to be the most knowledgeable SEO in the world about Google Local, though I’d like to think I’m getting there, I still look up to people like David Mihm and Mike Blumenthal. In particular, David Mihm’s Google Local Ranking Factors is an invaluable resource.

That said, it’s always nice to try and quantify exactly how important different factors are and do some analysis on which hypothesis are actually correct and which are just learned from the crowd and generally accepted as true.

I’ve got no ground-breaking insights in this post, but by analysing this data and other data I have come to the following conclusions:

1) – The raw number of reviews is not the only ranking factor.

We can see this by comparing for example the Renaissance Seattle Hotel and the Hilton Seattle Hotel – the Renaissance has WAY more reviews but still doesn’t rank.

2) – The raw number of citations is not the only ranking factor.

We can see this because the Grand Hyatt Seattle Hotel has an obscene number of citations compared to any other hotel in Seattle.

3) – The combined number of citations and reviews is not the only ranking factor

Although we’re getting warmer here (the sum column, E) this isn’t the whole story. If we look at the average sum of the top 7 ranking hotels we see that there are 3 hotels that don’t rank which have a higher sum than average – Renaissance, Grand Hyatt and the Crowne Plaza.

4) – Distance to centre (of Seattle) seems to play some part in the rankings

Looking at the data we see that the Edgewater Hotel has the highest combined total with many many reviews and a large number of citations but doesn’t rank number 1. Perhaps this is something to do with the fact that it’s a lot further out from the centre of Seattle than the other hotels – 1.3 miles to be precise, almost double the next furthest out ranking hotel at 0.7 miles (the Best Western).

5) Star ratings could well play a part in the rankings

Typically people have assumed that the raw number of reviews is more important than the sentiment of those reviews. However, this may not be true. Take a look at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel, a very low combined reviews and citations score but 4.5/5 stars in total of the reviews.

6) Quality of citation almost certainly plays a part

Firstly, assuming it didn’t – citation spam would be big business! But digging into the data I see that the best western has a very low combined score but has citations from sites such as the New York Times. Same again with the Hilton, which has some very strong citations from authority sites. This suggests to me that quality of citation is important, or perhaps the number of citation root domains? (like with links, perhaps multiple citations from one domain don’t count so much…)

Note 1

There is still speculation that the ‘regular’ SEO factors come into play such as pagerank or strength of domain. I’m not convinced this is a factor. After all, Google Local Listings are attached to an business name (and address/phone number), not a URL. Sometimes there isn’t even a URL for Google to attach to the listing. This makes me think that regular on-page SEO factors don’t carry that much weight. I’d like to hear other’s thoughts on this though?

Note 2

It’s worth noting that in the data you might like to exclude the Crowne Plaza Hotel from your data analysis – when gathering the data I see that it’s missing an image which may imply a wider issue about data perhaps? Not sure what a missing image means but I doubt it’s good news for the Crowne Plaza. This is backed up by the fact that it by rights (i.e. combined citations and reviews score) it should rank, but it doesn’t… Screenshot of what I’m seeing:

Note 3

In a usual analysis I would have looked at the category of the listings, I don’t think this is a factor in this case since it’s a competitive SERP and all the listings are likely tagged with the Hotel category.

To Conclude…

What can you do to get better rankings? Get more citations and reviews! The combined number of these seems reasonably well correlated with rankings once you factor in distance from centre etc. Especially if you can get positive reviews and citations from strong websites.

But also, to conclude, we see that the algorithms are somewhat complicated. I’ve still not completely figured out why some sites rank and why some don’t but I’m getting close. I’d love to hear analysis from other Google Local SEOs who’ve been digging around in data. I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours

Oh, and if you’d like to enquire about having Distilled manage your Google Local SEO then click here to get in touch…

One of the most frequent questions we get asked, both at Distilled and SEOmoz Q&A, is how a business should set up their website(s) to target multiple countries or multiple languages.

The majority of the questions boil down to whether a site is better being on one big global website (.com) or whether there should be a website (local top level domain) for each country. To help us answer this question, we wanted to take a look at the distribution of generic and local top level domains across the various regions – the theory being that generic domains are likely to be targeting multiple countries or languages, and that local tlds have been optimised for the local region.

To get some relevant data, we ran a couple of experiments.

First we took 50 random keyphrases (which were harder to generate than you might think!). We then looked at the top 10 results for these in Google UK, US, Australia and New Zealand.

We then pushed all the keyphrases through Google Translate to translate them into Dutch, German, French, Spanish and Italian. With our translations in hand, we queried the relevant “foreign” Google (NL, DE, FR, ES and IT) and looked at the top 10 results for each.

The following graph shows the split between generic TLDs and local TLDs across the 4 English-speaking countries we looked at. There probably isn’t much of a surprise here:

It’s worth pointing out that this experiment was run during the prolonged period of rubbish in the UK search engines. For this reason, this is the last you will hear of the UK results! On that note we are also ignoring the US results based on the fact that the .com has become synonymous with “American” and the .us local domain is all but irrelevant.

You get two interesting graphs when you look at the spread of generic vs local domains ranking in Google NZ and Google AU:

Generic Vs Local TLDs in Google NZ

Across the first page of SERPS in the sample keywords, there is a definite trend towards more local TLDs at the top of the results. In the Australian SERPS, 75% of sites that ranked in position 1 have a local TLD, compared with only 25% ranking in position 10. You can draw your own conclusions, though please note there is a big difference between correlation and causation, ‘nuff said.

The next interesting data point arose when we compared the distribution of generic and local domains across the translated keywords:

Immediately, it looks like there is something different with the French and Spanish results. They both have a much higher percentage of generic domains than I would expect and also a much higher percentage of generic domains than you see in NL, IT and DE.

My best guess as to why this is the case is that historically it was much harder to purchase .fr and .es domains due to tight restrictions on registrations. This graph, sourced via dnjournal shows what happened when the restrictions were lifted in 2004.

Number of French domains owned over time

Obviously, by that point there were a lot of generic (mainly .com) domains targeting the French market. These domains will have built up history, trust, links, etc., and many a webmaster will have stuck with a .com rather than switching to a .fr. It’s worth noting that these generic domains, contrary to our hypothesis, are targeting one language rather than targeting a global market with multiple languages.

Take a look at the results for “apprendre le php”. The entire first page is full of generic domains entirely in French.

Compare this with the results for “php leren” in Dutch, where only one of the top 10 results is a generic domain.

If we could look again at the SERPS and plot the number of sites with a single language (even if they are on a generic .com domain) then I’m sure we would see an even more compelling graph with the majority of sites being single language.

I think this is the crux of the matter. Rather than talking about generic vs local tlds, we should be talking about whether you should have one website targeting each country or one big global site that holds all your content and targets all the relevant countries.

I would always vote that having one website per country will – in the long run – out perform one generic site targeting all the relevant countries and languages.

Things are never that simple, however, and as I’m sure you’re all aware, you can’t always have one site with a single language per country. There are many countries where many languages are spoken, i.e., Belgium has three official languages. In this example, I would set up one website targeting Belgium, and within the site I would have a folder for each of the three official languages.

Whilst I think this the data is informative and useful, it’s worth pointing out that there are some definite flaws that could invalidate the data. Firstly, to save time we chose to use Google translate to translate the 50 source keywords. We would never recommend a client uses anything other than a native speaker to do keyword research, but I think in this case the impact on the results was probably negligible. Secondly – and certainly more likely to have had an impact – we only looked at a sample of 50 keywords in each language. Only with a dramatically increased sample size can we really be confident that what we are seeing isn’t just a random quirk of the data that was chosen. Having said that, personally I’m inclined to trust the data (which is possibly because it agrees with what I already thought!).

Rand recently wrote his 2007 self a letter and asked me and a bunch of other people to do the same.

I was struck, reading Rand’s letter, by the degree to which his advice to himself is useful and actionable right now (for himself – and, to a lesser degree, for me and others). I am hoping to re-read my advice to myself in that frame of mind afterwards. For now though, I am thinking purely in terms of advice I wish I could have imparted to myself two years ago.

When I read Rand’s invitation to contribute, I initially wasn’t sure what kind of advice I could give. I was bolstered, however, by an experience recently where I met up with a friend just striking out on her own into a new business venture. I realised that I have learnt a lot amount in the 4 years that Distilled has been going (possibly indicating how little I knew to start off with!).

It feels as though there are two main sources of advice from people who have “been there and done that”:

1. there is a natural selection element- simply by still being here, running a business that employs people, I get to impart some bits of advice in the form of “here is what we did – seemed to work for us”
2. more powerfully, there are some areas where you have tried working in more than one mode and discovered that one works significantly better. While this is still biased by our direct experience, it at least represents some element of what you might call ‘experience’ rather than just “well, it worked for us when we did it this way”

Anyway, without further ado, onto the letter.

June 2009

Dear 2007 Will,

I am writing from the future. When you get to this point and look back, you will be astounded by how much some things have changed and and simultaneously amazed by the degree to which some things remain the same.

Be that as it may, I now have a couple more years’ experience and, while I know there is a limited(!!?!) chance of you reading this, if you do, I hope you will have the humility to take the right bits to heart:

1. Embrace “Getting Things Done” more and sooner

I know you have already read the book, but I also know it will be a good 18 months before you realise the true power of “inbox to zero”. Remember that even if you don’t do any more as a result of being better organised (though you will) simply having the right systems in place will free your mind up to work on the right things much more of the time.

2. Hire smart people fast(er)

If we could take a joint trip back to 2005, I think this would be the single biggest thing we’d want to say to our 2005 self. You know all that time you spent slogging along with just you and Duncan? Imagine if you could have added some of the smart people you know now to the mix a couple of years sooner. That applies now. It may turn out, in the long-run that the single thing you are best at is delegating to smart people

3. Define your role better

Again, you have read the e-myth by this point, but you have still only paid it lip-service. Think in terms of a business with 15-20 people in it (and the next level on from that) and define the roles you and Duncan will need to fill (and only then work out what hats you are each wearing now). Take ownership and responsibility. Butt out of each other’s space, but ask for help when you need it. [For more on where we are up to with this now, those of you reading this in 2009 can read Duncan's recent post on his job role - it's a while since both founders wrote a post in the same week so I should probably link to it!].

4. Get good at mobile email

You can still upgrade to the 3G iphone later, but first stop being scared that being ‘always connected’ means ‘always doing email’. It means you can do email when you’ve got nothing better to do and have to do email much less when you do have better things to do.

5. Get a great bank manager

You’ll work this one out for yourself, but still, you might as well get going asap. You don’t have to deal with a call centre.

6. Start doing PR

Most of your business over the coming years will come either from existing customers / referrals or from people who “get to know” you and Distilled. This “getting to know” part isn’t actually rocket science – it’s all part of PR in its broadest sense. Raise your profile and seek amplifiers – the mechanisms, individuals and publications that can help you become better known.

7. Related to #6: Write more

Your clients like to read what you write and it both brings in new prospects and helps people get more comfortable with hiring you.

8. Raise your prices

You’re not charging enough. Seriously. (And connected to this, start thinking bigger – you are mainly constrained by your own beliefs).

9. Remember the flywheel

You have no idea what I’m talking about. First read ‘Good to Great’. Then remember the flywheel concept. Pick your battles and then focus on them consistently and repeatedly. Success breeds success so amplify what you can.

10. Sell your flat in late 2007

Trust me.

11. Don’t take all this too seriously and remember to have fun…

Having written that all down, it feels a little tactical. All of the things above will help you, but I think that above all remember the people – someone (I have now forgotten who it was unfortunately) who I thought couldn’t possibly have time for me – not only replied to something I wrote to them, but signed off their email with a genuine “let me know if I can do anything for you”. Try asking people that more often. It can be enlightening.

Love, 2009 Will

In amongst all the kerfuffle of the searchology news I’ve noticed something else new being tested on adwords. I’m not sure if this is a permanent change for a select number of sites or if it’s the start of a new change but when I search for ’small dog‘ in the US I see the following adwords result:

Expanding that plusbox shows me this:

Interesting huh! I wonder where Google is pulling those extra products from? They have long descriptions, price tags and nice images. Is this actually something that’s been out for a while and I’ve just not seen it before? I’d love to know your thoughts.

Update: Turns out this isn’t that new after all. It’s a test which has been ongoing for some time. The products are pulled from Google Base apparently. Check out the full Searchengineland story for more info.

Update 2: Thanks to tomsmith1984 who spotted this happening in the UK which I think might be a first: searching for littlewoods shows a plusbox for them in the UK.

There’s little that’s more exciting online at the moment than the viral hype surrounding The Dark Knight. It was pure luck that when Emily stuck a post-it on my desk today that said ‘working??’ as I watched the trailer for it, that I could (this time- ahem), reply with something along the lines of:

Beautiful. Except that’s not really what this post’s turned out to be (although there are similar elements). Instead, I’ve looked at the effectiveness of viral marketing for films such as The Dark Knight, and considered how this could be transferred to businesses operating online.

Engagment:

The Dark Knight is engaging its future audience on a whole new level. Other films, most notably Cloverfield, laid the groundwork for this process. A friend of mine was tuned into the Cloverfield phenomenon from the off, and blogged about how much more he got from the film because of the “little nods and winks to the internet frenzy throughout”. It’s more than feeling like you’re in the ‘in-crowd’ and superior to other viewers; it’s about feeling like you’re actually part of the conversation.

As demonstrated by Dell’s Ideastorm, this kind of engagment with the consumer from an actual, believable business perspective, really works.

Another example (that fits extraordinarily well) is Domino’s attempt to cash in on The Dark Knight’s online success. The idea was that fans had to have ordered a pizza online within the last 48 hours to be able to view the latest trailer. Engagement at its finest. And it would have been genius if only you couldn’t also watch the clip on YouTube.

Viral:

Above and beyond this ‘customer engagement’ however, what’s particularly clever about viral marketing for films is that it is, by definition, something that spreads infectiously. In terms of cost, it’s negligible compared to traditional forms of marketing and has the potential to bring in a huge, dedicated audience. The Dark Knight has all the ingredients to appeal to an online audience, and that includes me. Believe me when I say however, that my twin sister (the ‘control’ in this little experiment, if you will), is not part of that online audience. But when I started raving to her about The Dark Knight and its viral presence, not only did she get excited, she’d actually heard of it!

Is this a sign of things to come? Of our beloved niche social media finally spreading its wings and launching itself into the mainstream?

And what effect does it have for businesses online? It means that they can start appealing to social media sites for custom rather than just links. The recent live Honda ad is a perfect example of how well this could work. The skydiving advert appealed to traditional audiences by appearing on television first, but was also perfectly designed to grab the attention of online fans- YouTube alone amassed hundreds of thousands of views. And, just as with true online viral marketing, the cost involved (a reputed £500,000 including sandwiches for the crew) is nothing compared to “the PR column inches alone hyping the one-off event”. And then some. I wonder if any of those thousands of viewers will henceforth favour the Honda as a result.

Loyalty:

With The Dark Knight, fans who were loyal enough to spot the addresses, visit the bakery and eat the cake were rewarded with an almost godlike status within The Dark Knight buzz. Why is this technique so effective at generating attention online?

It’s a completely natural feeling to enjoy working for something in order to achieve a certain right or privilege. The idea of customer loyalty for businesses has been around offline for ages. For example, shop loyalty cards are ever more popular and, while the cost benefits they offer us are nothing compared to the value of the data they collect for the company’s market research team, there’s something very addictive about them. However, simply moving this online would not be the same as the idea of loyalty expressed above.

I think the secret lies in combining all three of these features- engagement, virality and loyalty.

I’m obviously not the first person to point out that online marketing has massive potential to build brand, attract new customers and improve relations with existing ones (particularly within the tech world, for obvious reasons). But there’s also the opportunity to make some money directly from these sites. Imagine if, for example, a chain such as Starbucks had a really really cool game online that was carefully designed to appeal to social media audiences and had discount coffees as a prize:

1. Engagement? Tick. Customers could be involved in any stage of the development, launch or participation of the game.
2. Viral? Tick. Fabulous content always has the potential to spread fabulously.
3. Loyalty? Tick. Your customers use their skill to earn a discount. They’ll/I’d love it.

The dangers:

There is, however, a fairly serious risk of alienating your online audience should your social media efforts fail. Like this.

Digg users, as a generic example, are notoriously fickle and have both the ability and the nature to destroy an online presence, particularly if there’s money involved. Is this a risk worth taking for your business? Absolutely.

Following on from our recent post where we asked various SEOs from around the world questions on geo-location one of our readers Sean Carlos emailed me asking if it was alright to leave quite a lengthy comment which included a few links to some articles he’s written. I thought the content was good enough to be worthy of it’s own blog post so here you go!

Sean Carlos:

Very nice post – oh so many complicated issues when considering locali[s|z]ation issues!

On point 1, when considering accented characters, I try to use numeric html entities to ensure my text is compatible with xml feeds used by blogging and other CMS software. The XML standard only recognizes 5 character entities (", &, ', <, >), one of which, ', is not even part of the HTML standard. More detail can be found in my article Accented Characters in HTML Documents: Considerations for Search Engine Optimization.

Point 7 is rather complicated. There are three main ways to distribute language variants of a site:

1. folder, i.e. apple.com/uk , apple.com/it
2. top level domain, i.e. apple.com, apple.co.uk, apple.it
3. sub domains, i.e. uk.apple.com, fr.apple.com, it.apple.it

Google is very good at dealing with any of these approaches – especially if it is easy to recognize content language. As mentioned in the post, server geographic location and incoming links are additional clues search engines can use.

The “best” solution really depends on the client’s market and future plans. For a site in Italian, the language market is limited to Italy with some “overflow” in neighboring countries. So a .it domain is a no brainer. Yet what about Switzerland? There are four legal languages. Add English to the mix in the case of many multinationals. Three of the legal languages are used extensively in neighboring countries (French, German and Italian).

Once consideration is the need to avoid shooting myself in the foot with duplicate content issues and dispersion of incoming links across multiple domains, i.e. .ch, .de and .at or .ch, .fr, .be and .ca. Yet some solutions may get me multiple listings (= more real estate, good!) in search results. Some top level domains are difficult to register if you don’t have a physical presence in the country (i.e. .fr). So, unfortunately, the answer is “it depends”.

In addition to the points mentioned in the post, I would insure language clues are inserted where appropriate in the html. Search engines are very good at automatically recognizing languages, using clues such as the domain, hosting location and incoming links. Text pattern analysis is probably decisive. Using the “lang” attribute on html tags and specifying a content language http header or meta equivalent can assist this process. More details can be found in my How Search Engines Detect HTML Document Human Language.

I met Sean at the Manchester SEO meetup last year and he was a pleasure to talk to. He works for Antezeta SEO Company in Italy. Thanks for stopping by Sean

Geo location is becoming increasingly relevant to search engine optimisation. This interview aims to ask questions about some of the hottest issues out there.

I spoke to 5 experts who are all active in the SEO world. The answers here have only been edited in the lightest sense of the word. No-one saw the replies of others before submitting their own responses so any overlaps have been included for interest’s sake.

(A quick nod should made in the direction of Sugar Rae’s excellent interview with five link development experts, which inspired the format of this post. If you haven’t read it, you should.)

Tadeusz Szewczyk of onreact.com- a German specialist in white-hat SEO techniques with an SEO 2.0 blog. He was born in Poland but now lives and works in Germany and answers our questions with respect to these two languages.

Maria Soledad Balayan is based in Argentina and works as an online marketing consultant for La Di Tella Marketing Club

Joost de Valk is an SEO consultant and webdesigner based in the Netherlands who works at Onetomarket.

Ciarán Norris is based in the UK and works just around the corner from us in London as the SEO & Social Media Director at Altogether Digital.

Duncan Morris is a Director here at Distilled in London and has been involved in web design and SEO for more years than he can remember.

Maria- would there be any differences optimising café instead of cafe?

You need to decide if you are thinking purely for SEO or for the impression you want users to get from your site as well. I will always go for the proper way of spelling. Misspelling could be really bad for reputation and trust; even though people make a lot of mistakes when writing, they expect you don’t. Sometimes if people search using accents they do it because they are expecting to get that exact result. An accent can change the meaning of the entire sentence.

You can always run an AdWords campaign paying for the word without the accent to see what impact it has.

Last year Spain announced that the letter “ñ” was going to be accepted when registering domains and this will clearly cause changes in the way people from Spain and other Spanish speaking countries use it in domains. In the long run that affect will be translated to SERPs too, but it will take a lot of time to see that happen.

From the SEO point of view I am not sure if I will register a domain with a word that contains the letter “ñ” on it unless it is a powerful word or if I don’t have any intentions to appeal to other languages.

Tad – would you optimise with or without an umlaut or does this not make any difference?

German umlauts do affect SEO. Also Polish letters do, but in a different way. German umlauts are easy to mimic in that you write “ae”, “oe” or “ue”. You will notice though that an umlaut and its mimicked representation rank differently.

In Polish you have plenty of letters that do not exist in English or other languages. Thus you have to take into account that many people using non-Polish keyboards will not be able to spell correctly. In German this happens also but not that often.

For both languages you need to make sure the umlauts or special characters are rewritten correctly in your URLs. In German you get the above mentioned “ae” etc. but in Polish you just take the English equivalent. You should tag your pages (the Web 2.0 way) with additional spelling variations.

Ciarán- do you have any experience of this?

We have an interesting case study here – my name! A Google for my full name (Ciarán Norris) with and without the accent (or fotha to give it its correct, Gaelic, name) shows only very minor differences suggesting that the engines are getting better at determining that words with & without an accent may well be the same thing.

And the same question to number 5, Duncan- any thoughts?

Since english doesn’t have any accented characters this isn’t really something I have come across. There are definitely differences, though I think most of these are jusified, i.e. the addition of the accent changes the meaning of the word. If you search for cafe you get a different set of results (with overlap) than if you search for café. The most obvious change being which wikipedia page is indented.

From a usability point of view unless a native speaker said otherwise, I would always advise ensuring the URL doesn’t contain any accented characters. The following URL just looks messy to me, and I’m fairly sure that native speakers don’t read %C3%A9 as é!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caf%C3%A9

(To be fair to wikipedia, in this case the page that ranks takes you to a non accented version, and they do redirect between the two. However, a search for Zurich returns a wikipedia page with the ‘less attractive’ URL.)

Joost I’d pick the domain extension that would work for the biggest group of people

Duncan As with many things, its a balancing act. Whilst a .com is likely to appeal to a wider range of people it can make it harder to get it to rank in the local search results.

Ciarán I actually think that a .fr might well be more likely to appeal to French speakers which highlights the fact that ther are two elements to decisions like this- cultural and technical.

If I was aiming to target a group of English speakers (across UK, US, Aus, NZ etc..) I’d probably go for a .com, based in the US as that’s where the biggest market is and therefore where the biggest potential SEO win is. I’d then rely on PR/buzz marketing to raise the profile of the site in other English territories.

There would have to be a similar decision making process for any group of languages (also remembering that as in many ways what may seem to be the same language actually isn’t- French Canadian for instance is a distant dialect).

Tad I’d use local TLD and servers: .de, .at and .ch for German, .pl for Poland. I’d also use local hosting for each country and of course translate the site in question.

When targeting a new market in a different language the most important thing is to do new market and keyword research. If you assume the people want and search for exactly the same things everywhere then you’ve already lost.

You should also strive to get links in the particular language you target, ideally from sites based in the respective country.

Maria Even when people speak the same language, if they live in different countries that could mean that they have cultural differences and different usage of words (slang). You need to be aware of that and consider those things when writing copy, managing website content and optimizing that content for specific keywords.

Joost It’s easier because there’s less competition.

Tad It’s easier due to less competition. It’s harder due to smaller market (less traffic).

Maria Locally, I think that when you have less competition everything is easier, like in any industry. Fewer amounts of SERPs mean less websites to compete with and better chances to get ranked on top. Of course, if you need to compete with the whole world, it’s more complicated.

Duncan I think the law of averages should make it easier since there won’t be as many competitors. The flip side is a lot of the major sources of traffic (certainly from a social media standpoint), don’t have such a presence in the smaller countries.

Duncan I don’t envisage any massive leaps forwards. It wouldn’t surprise me to see another tweak to the display of local results.

I’d like to think these local results will continue to improve. I think there is still too much of a bias on how close you are to the arbitrary centre of the town / city you are in.

I’d also like to see changes (or clarification) on what exactly google.com is meant to be when the searcher is in the UK. Given that the default search engine for firefox is google.com the percentage of people using google.com from the UK is, in my opinion, likely to increase. It seems a shame for these people to see less optimal results than those people using google.co.uk. Currently it appears to be a (random?) mix of American results and UK results.

Maria As the amount of websites increases, localisation is going to have an important role because is going to provide (at least it should) more accurate results to users. I would love to have the “find business” feature from Google maps applied on other countries.

Ciarán All of the engines are looking to provide more & more locally relevant results, and the growth of mobile is only likely to fuel this. Take for example the search for coffee on a mobile: Google presents Wikipedia, Yahoo! aims to return the nearest café. If they can translate this to web searches (where they admittedly lack GPS) it could be a huge change in the SERPS. The release of Android is only likely to fuel this.

Tad More inclusion of geotargeting into ranking algos plus more reliance on reviews and local review sites.

Joost I think search engines will become even better in recognizing and dealing with smaller languages. Especially Google has been getting increasingly better in Dutch over the last years.

Tad There is still a difference but some changes are rolled out simultaneously while others that have been in the US still are not online in German. Poland is more often left behind.

Maria It used to happen but it is getting better with time.

Joost Yeah, we lag behind up to 3 months behind the UK and the US

Ciarán Sorry – no real opinion on this one!

Duncan I don’t think the algorithmic updates lag behind, though I do think the tactics used by (your average) UK SEO-er do. The SEO industry from the eyes of marketing departments is also a couple of years behind.

A topic fairly close to our hearts is reputation management. If you look at the ‘cleanliness’ of the politicians over here versus those in the US you will see that at the moment we don’t appear to have a clue!

Tad It depends. For tourism related sites you want a site from the destination country not the country you are from.

Joost Yes, absolutely, especially in countries like France and Germany, where people are a bit more “nationalistic”.

Duncan I think UK searchers are equally as comfortable seeing and using .co.uk and .com. However I believe (though have no first hand knowledge) that in most of the other european languages the tld is more important. That would make sense for anywhere where english isn’t the first language, since the majority of .com domains are written in english (or american, sorry small dig!).

Ciarán We’ve seen examples of local TLDs receiving more clicks, however again it varies; we in the UK seem less bothered about using a dot com (and indeed often think of this as normal) than many other countries.

Maria I think it could have an impact depending on the user’s experience. If people use local search engines they will expect to receive local results. And more experienced users may use additional keywords to let the search engine know that.

There is a feature that you can use when searching locally that tells the engine to show only results of the specific country (example: google.com.ar let you filter only pages from Argentina) and some people use it. Sometimes these results show .com results too because robots recognize the location or the language. Some websites are not recognized in these SERPs and in those cases they could loose some traffic.

If your business is locally focused you need to know that you will get better ctr if you are able to address that with the information you provide on the website. In this sense the long tail is going to get stronger because as times pass by more results are going to show up so there will be more competition for keywords. On the other hand users will get more advanced with more knowledge and they will apply that to the search phrases they use.

Maria I would say that for international geo-location purposes using .fr vs subdirectories could be a better choice. I am sure there are other factors (non SEO related) that made those companies decide to go for one or the other. That could be a good question to ask Matt Cutts.

Tad For Google it’s the tld domain. For the users in many cases a /de subdirectory would be best. For instance I would love to browse through Amazon or Ebay in English, German and Polish at the same time. I do not like the subdomain thing, it combines the disadvantages of both. Yes, for me (freelancers) .com is best as I rank well everywhere without the need for several domains.

Ciarán Again, this is a situation where more than just SEO is going to come into the equation. By having sub-domains (a la Apple) you can utilise a common URL in all advertising & packaging. We’re currently working with a major global brand who plan to have a single URL for just this reason; they need the URL on the product but they produce all their products in one location and then box them locally.

The Amazon method however allows you to totally own the SERPS and would probably be the method would we recommend if the only consideration is SEO.

Joost I prefer the different TLD’s, but in most cases there’s a solution already there, and you have to work with it. In my work with KLM, who use subdirectories, I’ve noticed that Google is pretty damn good in sending people to the right subdirectory, even if they’re searching in english in say Brazil, they would send them to /travel/br_en/

Duncan There are issues to overcome with either route. I think I’m currently leaning slightly towards having one domain and doing it at the folder level.

The problem with the amazon route is that you split link juice across the various domains you own. Even for a company the size of amazon, this is a problem, since the de-facto URL is always amazon.com. I often see amazon.com outranking amazon.co.uk and have to manually alter the URL.

The nice thing about having multiple tlds is that you have a local tld which can have a homepage in the local language. It also helps you to dominate the SERPS for branded search.

It wouldn’t surprise me to see the search engines changing their algorithms slightly in an attempt to help get the relevant results in local searches. For example, I could believe that in the future you will be able to link domains via webmaster central (or the other equivalents) which could somehow pass some of the domain trust of the .com to the local languages.

Going down the apple route solves the domain weight issue, since all links are to the root domain. This route makes geo location harder since you will break a couple of the guidelines in order to rank locally (local tld, server hosted locally). There are a couple of issues with the apple route:

Firstly, if you check the ‘pages from the UK’ button, apple disappears. The 15% [NBED LINK) of people that use this option, will not be able to find apple at all.

The other issue is similar to the amazon.co.uk / amazon.com problem. If you search ipod on google.co.uk and click on the indented result (wtf!) you get to the ipodclassic page, with prices in dollars. If you then click on the Store, you end up in the american store, and have to click a couple more links before you can find a UK store. Here in the UK we often get pages targeting americans.

For smaller budgets there is also a duplicate content issue, or a cost invovled with saying something different when you target the UK than the US.

Ciarán Not as well as they’d like!

Joost Getting better, but not there yet, sometimes you’re expecting a map to show up and it doesn’t and sometimes it’s there when it shouldn’t be. I’m hardly ever annoyed by it though, which is probably a good sign.

Duncan I’d give them 7 or 8 out of 10. As with most things you can always find edge cases that aren’t caught, but most of the time they get it right. (Assuming you are a fan of the local results, which I’m not!)

Tad They do OK by now. Vertical (local) search engines do better of course

Maria I am not sure how well they do it but I don’t think it is an easy job either! I think they will need to improve a lot since results are increasing and that will make it even harder for users to find what they are looking for. Because of this, companies need to be informed and should make it easy for search engines to recognize if their website is locally focused or not.

Joost Yes. It’s had some impact, but not a huge one… Can’t share the details unfortunately.

Tad I did for testing purposes, could not see any real results, did not monitor the results in the long run yet though.

Maria I have never used Google’s webmaster central. I am a marketer that uses SEO as a Marketing strategy and the tool I use most of the time to analyze user behavior is web traffic analytics. I work with a team of programmers for everything that is coded related and they don’t use Google webmaster central either. I may consider use it in the future because I know is really useful for most webmasters.

Ciarán Not as yet – we try to set things up so that we don’t need to.

Duncan Haven’t really used them. We always try to get the fundamentals right so the geo-location settings are redundant. If you rely on this setting there is probably something wrong with the setup that you should get fixed.

Duncan Who? You mean Google isn’t the only search engine!?

Tad They fail completely as the do barely exist or not at all in Germany and Poland. So I don’t even bother.

Joost Don’t know them that well. With Google having a 90%+ market share in most countries I work in, I tend to focus on Google…

Maria To tell you the truth I am only focus on Google. Google has more than 80% search market share in Latin American countries so focusing on Google can give you pretty good results, at least for now.

Ciarán It varies – but certainly Yahoo’s advances in mobile have given them some pretty neat case studies.

Thanks to everyone for contributing. I’m sure you’ll agree there’s some really interesting opinions in there to think about.

Users of google.co.uk will be familiar with the choice to trim results from ‘the web’ to ‘pages from the UK’ when searching. For those of you who aren’t, it’s just an option to refine your search from the google.co.uk page- the default is ‘the web’, but there is the option just to search UK pages:

The results this modification bring in are notoriously arbitrary at the best of times although, to the uninitiated, they may seem the most obvious way to find the most relevant search results to their query.

According to Clear Site Marketing, “stats indicate that something like 50% of all visitors use the ‘pages from the UK’ option”. This seems a bit high to us, but we haven’t found any stats to contradict it. Regardless, it’s likely to be a volume worthy of attention. So what does it do? What’s the attraction?

Running a few searches for queries that might ideally return a local result didn’t reveal anything of great interest. A search for ‘coffee shop’ on google.com, google.co.uk (the web) and google.co.uk (pages from the UK) gave the following results: (I’ve highlighted all replicated results so you can track it more easily).

These results are more or less what you’d expect. The short-tail input means there’s very little chance of turning up a specific ‘local result’, in the sense of a coffee shop that you can physically visit, in any of the variations. It’s interesting to see how the wikipedia result has been moved off the page for the UK pages, even though its tld is .org rather than anything more incriminating (such as .com). In contrast, a .net made it in the UK pages results. The reason for this may come to light (or at least come a bit closer to the light) with a look at some other search terms. It certainly gives an indication of what’s to come….

Changing tact a little, searching for ‘ipod’ from these three starting points brings much meatier results.

‘ipod’ obviously has a much stronger online brand than ‘coffee shop’ and it only refers to one thing. So what is the differential? (Yes, I did feel a bit like Dr House then).

Well, the most immediate thing to jump out is that Apple has no presence whatsoever in the UK pages results. This caused much debate in the office and you can look forward to a dedicated post on it soon.

The second point to notice is that the two sets of results from .co.uk are very similar if you take away the top three slots on ‘the web’ results. Imagine they’re not there, and just bump the results up three places- it’s like seeing double (well, nearly). Optimisation efforts across .co.uk and .com don’t mirror each other this closely (ie. if you move up two slots in .com that doesn’t necessarily mean you move two places in .co.uk, or vice versa). This implies that although there is some difference across the two .co.uk algorithms, the results are essentially the same, but with different filters in place.

Did you already know that? I didn’t. I thought a .co.uk (UK pages) result would deliver pages that had specifically optimised for local results. According to Rand’s whiteboard Friday video on the subject, there are several different methods for this.

Surely one of the best ways to appear prominently in a UK pages result is to host your site in the UK? So how come the top result www.ipod.org.uk is hosted in Belgium? This implies that efforts to locally optimise a page aren’t that effective on their own, but what ranks in ‘the web’ ranks in the ‘UK pages’ as long as it has a .uk somewhere in the tld (a domainname.com/uk just won’t cut the mustard), right?

Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. If you look back to the ‘coffee shop’ results, there are four .com’s and one .net in the top ten ‘UK pages’ results. If you can’t get hold of that crucial .uk, then it seems the alternative is to host your site in the UK. *

I think that’s pretty harsh for all the UK based businesses that happen to have a .com tld and want to host outside of the UK- they’re essentially missing out on a large percentage of google.co.uk searches.

It must be pretty cool for these guys though:

• That works up until the last result www.holylochcoffeeshop.com – a website with a .com tld and an ip address that’s hosted in Germany- your guess is as good as ours!

To make up for not being in the newspapers on Sunday (after two weeks in a row), I had the great pleasure of appearing in an SEOmoz whiteboard ‘Friday’ (which wasn’t on Friday since they filmed loads at SMX last week).

Duncan and I had a great time meeting old friends and making new friends last week, and getting a chance to speak with Rand, one of our best buddies on the other side of the pond, about internationalisation issues was a huge highlight for me.

Props to Rand for making it look so easy – I was very nervous, but he is a class act and huge shout to Scott for his great editing and for getting rid of the passers-by who walked in front of the camera!

Without further ado, go and watch it at source: ranking foreign domains or view it here: