Given my over-arching interest in all things mobile (and especially mobile SEO), I subscribe to a fair few feeds giving me mobile and mobile SEO news and opinion. I am always keen to learn of good ones I don’t know about, so feel free to drop a link in the comments. I currently subscribe to:

General Mobile News

• As you will see from my round-up, I get a lot of my general mobile news from smstextnews - a highly recommended read

Mobile SEO

• Official Google mobile blog
• Mobile SEO News
• Rank Mobile
• Not recently updated: mobile-seo.co.uk

Mobile development

• Cameron Moll (buy the Mobile Web Design Book)

Fun stuff

• Our friends the texperts - a great read of facts you probably didn’t know

News round-up

Given that I am reading all this stuff, I thought it might be useful to do a quick round-up, summary post (it might happen regularly, you never know). If you can’t wait for round-up posts, you can keep track of mobile stuff I’m interested in by following my weekly mobile del.icio.us tag.

The more data we all use when we’re out and about, the more backhaul becomes a problem. It’s not one that many people outside the industry think about. Backhaul is the process of connecting mobile base stations to the core network. This week Vodafone has struck a deal:

Vodafone has announced that it’s struck a five year deal with BT which will see BT’s wholesale arm providing connectivity between Voda’s base stations and its own network.

Full story: Vodafone backhaul deal

Particularly interesting (to me) is the talk of BT’s 21st century network…. Go read the article then do a bit of googling around that if you are feeling geeky…

Much like the turning off of analogue TV that is going to happen over the next few years to free up spectrum once everyone can use digital, the mobile networks have a load of spectrum that is currently used for 2G services and that many people would like to see used for more modern services once 3G coverage gets good enough. It would be Ofcom’s remit in the UK, but the Australian government is making headway on the issue:

Telstra has finally received the go ahead from the Aussie government to close down its CDMA network, after three months of waiting. The telco had hoped to close it down in January of this year, after its 3G network reached the same coverage levels, but was prevented by the government.

Full story: Telstra closing 2G network

I have written before about how the mobile operators are desperate to avoid becoming “just the pipe” in the sense of simply allowing people to access the wider web with no value add. Strategy Eye report (via smstextnews again!) that:

CNN International has signed a deal with Samsung in which the manufacturer will be the first to offer a pre-loaded CNN news application.

Full story: CNN International deal with Samsung

On a light-hearted note, you might enjoy watching a (grainy, low sound quality) mobile video of a flash-mob descending on London’s Liverpool Street station to do a live ‘rick-roll’ of the station.

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.

OK, so twitter may be the worst thing that has happened since the invention of the Internet for productivity in the office (beating Facebook walls by a country mile), but it has its uses.

One of these uses is online reputation management. When we are looking at ways of putting across a consistent message for ourselves or our clients in the search engine results for a person or company name, we are looking for pages or websites that consistently have the ability to rank for names even among pretty serious competition. Twitter is an example of just such a service.

The structure of Twitter is well set up to pass its considerable domain weight to profile pages:

• Every tweet is it’s own page
• Other peoples tweets link to your profile page with your username as anchor text if they are replying to you (syntax = @username)
• Every person’s profile links to the profiles of people they follow

Therefore if you create a popular account that gets followed by lots of other popular accounts and people reply to you, you will end up with a profile page that has lots of internal links with good anchor text for your profile name. If your profile name is the name you want to end up ranking for, then you are well on your way.

Things to remember

• Make your username your real name or company name (whichever you are trying to rank for)
• Make sure your profile is public so that it ends up with rich, changing content and so you get links from other strong pages such as the timeline and upcoming

The power of this first occurred to me when I realised that my profile had jumped into the search results for my name, but a tiny amount of digging around shows that it’s true for even competitive searches such as Barack Obama.

Use social media responsibly

As with all social media marketing, I wouldn’t be the white hat I am if I didn’t point out that you should respect the rules of the forums you are playing in. In Twitter’s case, I think that’s probably mainly not spamming people.

But the point here is that this will work much better if you use Twitter ‘properly’ in the sense of using it for (even irregular) updates about yourself and/or your company. As I mentioned above, the power is used best when you get those keyword-rich internal links which happen when you get plenty of followers and hold conversations with people.

If you want to follow others in the office, the active twits are:

• Me: willcritchlow
• Duncan: duncanmorris
• Tom: tomcritchlow (Tom’s updates are protected, so good luck making it to ‘friend’ status ;))
• Lucy: langdog
• Andy: andyjamesdavies

Reputation management has been hitting the headlines recently for all sorts of reasons. But what kind of reputation has ‘reputation management’ got?

Managing the reputation of a company in need (or teaching them how to do it themselves) is an attractive opportunity for those in the SEO business. However, there’s also no denying that the process itself is perfectly placed for a reputation slur.

From some viewpoints, Reputation Management is morally questionable; ‘covering stuff up’ is the most common criticism I’ve come across. Reputation Management is also the right kind of subject to be taken on by a jaded online community and shot down. There’s already a massive ‘anti-seo’ movement on some social media sites: the real irony would be if Reputation Management was itself to get a negative reputation.

We’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this. Whether you have a solution to the potential problem, thoughts on why reputation management is a good (or bad) thing or just some ideas about reputation in general then comment below and let us know.

We’ve started the ball rolling with a few solutions/thoughts/ideas of our own:

• “A good reputation is more valuable than money”- Yes, yes it is. It can take literally years to build and can be threatened in days or hours by information that’s either untrue or misinformed. That’s simply not fair.

• It helps companies engage better with their customer base. A company that’s been dragged through the mud, with or without justification, is much more likely to actually listen to what people are saying about it.

• It means you don’t have to be dull. Hear me out. Imagine your company wanted to do something new and exciting but were worried that it might flop and attract negative attention online. A reputation should at the very least be interesting and reputation management means you can take those risks that would otherwise be too dangerous.

Nervous? No, never, not me. With a refreshing glass of water obligingly pushed into my hand (wish I’d hit the complimentary wine a little earlier- it was all gone by the time I felt composed enough to partake- that’ll learn me eh?) and lashings of deep fried goodness to take on any tummy rumbles, I surveyed the scene. Packed to the ceiling with glamorous (not a brace or monobrow in sight) tech ladies (and a few chaps), I did a quick positioning check to see if my name-tag sticker was ok and dived into the fray…

I found the whole evening very rewarding. The talks were informative without being too heavy for a Tuesday in the pub and the general atmosphere was really friendly and non-intimidating. First up was the birthday girl Judith ‘deCabbit’ Lewis, who delivered a rapid-fire synopsis of ‘SEO- The Core Elements’. Useful to a noob like myself (I’m still suffering from a slight case of jargonitus), the Q&A session allowed a few more in depth issues to come to light.

Next was Sheila Farrell who spoke passionately about the importance of separating content and design on your website in ‘Semantic Markup and Organic SEO’. I’m not a natural techie, so quite a lot of this was over my head (but I still took notes!) For me, the most interesting point was how crucial accessibility is as the Internet becomes more widely used across a full range of platforms refined for every kind of user.

Finally, Sarah Mcvittie (of CEO Texpert fame) took to the floor. She started with an interesting ‘vision’ of where her team see their service in 2010- a fully functional, tailored service there to be used with ease whenever the situation requires it. You can read more about mobile search in our interview with Texpert CEO Thomas Roberts. A great presentation and an even more engaging Q&A session after. The most interesting point I took was exemplified with the texpert query asked a few years ago: Which office did The Office in the office merge with?

Zzzz….. Goes some way to showing how human powered search is likely to hang around for quite a while! (The answer of course is the Swindon branch of Wernham Hogg).

All in all, a successful evening and a chance to meet some of the faces behind the names- I look forward to next time! A big thank you to Sarah Blow for organising the event.

Google has a new policy that all AdWords display URLs must match destination URLs.

I think they must be confusing ‘domain’ with ‘URL’. The guidelines say:

In line with our existing policy, we will continue to require that your ad’s Display URL matches its Destination URL (the URL of your landing page).

But they then go on to say that:

www.google.com/extratext

Would be an acceptable display URL for the destination URL:

http://sub.google.com/miscellaneous

(the sub-domain is allowed because it is the same domain - this is explicitly allowed by the guideline).

Now, unless I am missing something, sub.google.com/miscellaneous and www.google.com/extratext are both URLs and they do not match (contravening the introduction to the new rule). What is true is that the domains of the two match and I think this is what they are trying to say.

Could be a helluva lot clearer, in my opinion.

A lot of search conversation online is about:

• online marketing (of one form or another) - often including encouraging more conversations about a client online
• reputation monitoring - in real time and looking at both alerts about bad news and information about the spread of good news
• reputation management - sometimes not so different from regular SEO, but with different goals

Research is an area that is often over-looked (beyond the research needed to do the above - e.g. keyword research).

Large brands often care intensely about a level of detail that simply doesn’t break onto the radar for small businesses. One area that we have found ourselves doing more of recently is analysis of online conversations, share of voice, positive and negative slants and tracking the way conversations spread.

I have sometimes felt that it is a bit strange that I should be a good person to do this kind of thing, but with a background in stats, consulting and (obviously) search, I have been able to dig out a few tricks that help with the analysis.

One of these tricks is what I wanted to share today.

Background - why am I doing this?

When you are measuring share of voice and tracking the spread of conversations, you are sometimes in the position that you were tracking the topic from the beginning, but sometimes you need to do the analysis retrospectively.

When you are digging into something retrospectively, you can carry out all kinds of search on a variety of platforms - regular search engines, dedicated blog search engines and buzz or reputation tracking tools, but the output is typically HTML and RSS.

Now, I find that Excel is by far and away the best tool for slicing and dicing data (I love the way the new Excel makes pivot tables and pivot charts so much easier by the way). It is not particularly easy to get data from an RSS feed into Excel in order to cut and splice.

In order to save you from the pain of data entry or grep / sed / awk hacking, I wanted to present an easy way to do this:

How to get RSS information into Excel

For example, earlier this week, I was analysing discussion about Sharon Osbourne and Vic Reeves at the Brit Awards (they had a bit of a bust-up, possibly because they represent competitors in the bingo space).

So, supposing I want to get information into Excel about blog posts about both of them. I could start by creating an advanced Google blog search in order to find posts mentioning both names published in the week after the Brits. Then:

• Create a Google Docs spreadsheet
• Go to your blogsearch results page
• Copy the URL of the results as RSS
• Create a formula in your Google Docs spreadsheet containing:

=importfeed(rss-url,,true)

Make sure you wrap the URL in double quotes. The empty second argument is for restricting which bits of data you want from the RSS (the help is very good). The ‘true’ third argument says you want a header row to tell you what your columns are. If you want to add a fourth numerical argument, you can limit how many rows you return.

Once you have done this, the information from your RSS feed (in this case your custom search) is pulled into the spreadsheet - you can then either work on it there or (more likely) export it to Excel and work on it locally to make some cool charts and graphs for your presentations.

When I first needed to do this, I was just about to dive into an hour-long task of faffing with the data, before I thought of doing this. An hour-long job then took literally 5 minutes. Happy

Other cool things Google Docs can do

I haven’t had a play with the rest of the functionality yet, but just the names of some of the other functions imply that they might be pretty cool:

=importXML()

=importHTML()

The importHTML() function appears to be able to drag data in from html tables or lists. Potentially hugely powerful.

In the course of some of the work we have been doing recently, we have been thinking about the differences in mobile usage between the UK and the US. There are a lot of reasons why people use phones differently on opposite sides of the Atlantic:

• Early technology differences in the networks
• Business model differences from the networks
• Different handset adoption patterns (caused by technology and business model differences)
• Geographical differences
• and a variety of other social and technological factors

Without getting into the usage differences too much, I wanted to highlight two key language differences that I think have a significant impact on people’s way of thinking about much of mobile.

Cell vs. mobile

Handsets are ubiquitously called mobile phones (or mobiles) in the UK.

In the US, the normal terminology (from the cellular communication underpinning the network) is cell phone (or cell).

In and of itself, this different is not particularly noteworthy, but, when combined with one more factor, I think it provides a fascinating insight.

In both countries, the buzz is all about mobile internet (and, to a slightly lesser degree, mobile search). In the UK, my belief (given that we call the handsets ‘mobiles’), this is equivalent in people’s minds to ‘internet / search on the handset’.

I am not the right person to speculate on the US, but the fact that it isn’t the ‘cellular internet’ leads me to think that there would be a tendency for the man on the street to think about the ‘mobile internet’ as potentially distinct from the handset and more about any kind of internet access on the move (e.g. a laptop with a data card).

I have no data to back this up - it is pure speculation - but in conversation with a few Americans, I have gathered a bit of anecdotal evidence that there is a different way of thinking about the meaning of ‘mobile’ as it pertains to the internet.

Operator vs. Carrier

The other difference has less of an impact in my opinion, but I find it interesting the way the languages have evolved in parallel.

In the UK, we talk about mobile operators, mobile networks or, officially, MNOs: Mobile Network Operators. (There used to be 4 main operators: Vodafone, Orange, O2 and T-Mobile. They were joined by 3 a the 3G spectrum auctions and there are also now a variety of so-called MVNOs: Mobile Virtual Network Operators who don’t actually run a network but offer a branding / pricing / customer service differentiator piggy-backing on an established operator’s network e.g. Virgin Mobile, Tesco Mobile(+)).

In the US, the primary terminology is carriers (e.g. Verizon, Cingular).

As Orwell noted, the words we use to describe things have a huge impact on our feelings about those things. By calling the networks ‘carriers’ in the US, as mobile data services grow, there is a tendency to think of them as providing ‘just the pipe’. The carriers are desperate to avoid the fate of their fixed-line cousins who found themselves in a commoditised market shuttling bits between content providers and consumers. In the UK, I think the pull of the content providers will prove stronger than the walls on any kind of walled-garden ‘mobile internet’, but the ‘operator’ terminology could be seen as an attempt to make it sound as though there is more to the job than just ‘carrying’ the bits - that they need to somehow ‘operate’ the whole system to make it work well.

MVNO

Incidentally, Tesco’s MVNO, which is powered by O2’s network could become a hugely-powerful force in the UK, in my opinion. T-Mobile’s MVNO plays have been hugely successful for them in increasing network usage gathering marginal revenue that wouldn’t otherwise have been on the table and combining O2 (currently the UK’s ‘cool’ operator, with the iPhone) with the brand, power and reputation for cost-effectiveness of Tesco could be huge.

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!