Andrew R H Girdwood

The Search Blogrunners

2008-07-04T11:01:00.005+01:00

What's your homepage? iGoogle? Mine's Blogrunner as it lets me see, at a glance, what's hot in the blogs. I really wish that Google offered something like this - a Google News for Blogs. Even better would be a Google Blogrunner that let me picked the sources or keywords I cared about as feeders and let them influence the agenda.

The rest of this post is a little bit of a boast.

Google recently asked for people's SEO recommendations. That was pretty rare.

What was also rare was that WebmasterCentral post started a thread/headline in blogrunner. Well done Susan Moskwa. I can't be %100 sure that's a Google first. It's one of the first I've noticed, though.

I noticed this because my trick question? post was also included in the blog discussion thread.

There are very few Search blogs that make Blogrunner. Here's the list of people who made this discussion:

See how influential Barry is!

Google's trick question?

2008-07-01T16:22:00.005+01:00

I dig the fact that Google have updated their SEO page. The update includes two key areas: what an SEO might offer & useful questions to ask an SEO.

It's interesting to note that a few of these bullet points seem to edge towards suggesting that an SEO should offer a little bit more than just SEO analysis; content creation or other complementary marketing services are two suggested extras.

In particular, the question "What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe?" caught my eye.

Have you been to an SEO pitch? How much do you like that question?

I'm always keen to stress that ethical SEO is not usually quick. A common analogy is to pair SEO to a marathon and PPC to a sprint. Of course, SEO can produce results quickly if an otherwise authoritative site has some easy to fix and howling issues (like a disallow: / in the robots.txt).

What about results? Do you talk keyword positions any more? Really? Even with geographic results being increasingly common and personalised results frequent. Perhaps you talk about traffic... but then can you predict search frequencies?

A big company once asked me to predict some search frequencies for their brand term. I asked them whether they were planning another year of TV ads and whether they planned to repeat last year's aggressive London Underground poster campaign. They had no idea. It was pretty easy to point out that those offline advertising campaigns have dramatic effects on their search frequencies and I was in no position to even estimate their brand traffic until they knew more about their marketing plans for the year.

Face it; "What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe?" is a tough question to answer.

I'm glad Google's pushed it to the fore, though. SEOs who guarantee high positions, quickly, for new sites in competitive marketplaces should get caught out. They'll probably repeat their unlikely predictions whereas better educated and more ethical SEO agencies in the pitch will likely explain some of the issues around the question.

Upcoming.org's RSS; my fault or theirs?

2008-07-01T12:46:00.003+01:00

I'm really not sure whether this was my mistake or a yellow card for Upcoming.org. The Upcoming.org RSS feed is one of the data streams which gets pulled into the bigmouth friendfeed and the newly set up (still in development) bigmouth tumblr account.

Imagine my distaste then when I saw a generic "Get Going with Upcoming this Summer" appear on our tumblr (where it'll make it way to twitter too).

As you can see it happened to the inspirational Brian Solis too.

As it turns out there are more than one RSS feed for your upcoming events. The RSS button on the left of your profile page is the 'combined events' stream. The RSS button on the right of the profile page is the 'events' stream.

The generic "Get Going with Upcoming this Summer" only appeared in the 'combined events' RSS feed and not the 'events' feed. Needless to say; I've switched over to 'events' from 'combined events'.

I'm not sure "Get Going with Upcoming this Summer" belongs in either though - why would anyone subscribing to an individual or company's Upcoming RSS want to get such a generic message? Imagine you've subscribed to a number of Upcoming RSS feeds? You'd get the same generic message dozens of times.

Tumblr's Pharma Spam Problem

2008-06-30T17:18:00.003+01:00

I've rather fallen in love with Tumblr. It's just so easy. The bookmarklet is a brill way to 'bookmark' links, videos, quotes and pretty much anything.

In fact, I've started the process of putting together a big mouth tumblr. It's not that easy; I've someone working on a skin. I keep on toying with the intro text; there's so much to say it often out-weighs the summaries of posts tumblr draws in via RSS.

It's also pretty easy to see that tumblr has a spam problem. It's free, easy and quick - it'll therefore attract spammers. The screen grab on the left is the first set of results from a site:tumblr.com search and its dominated by pharma spam.

The spam's pretty easy for Google to spot. The first result there is for brchildreinftyleno.tumblr.com/ and that's simply a doorway page with JavaScript redirect. I'm surprised Google still lists the sub-domain in the site: search. If you think Google ranks most important pages first in the site: search then perhaps tumblr is cause to re-consider.

Five Points of LoudTwitter Etiquette for LiveJournal

2008-06-30T14:03:00.001+01:00

My oldest surviving blog is on LiveJournal. The first post there dates from 2002. I love LiveJournal as it has a great community feel. Friends who know nothing about Search, Display or Affiliate marketing post there and I stay kept up to date with what's going on.

Recently a question that I'm seeing asked there is; "What's with all these tweets?"

There's no reason why your average LiveJournaller should know anything of Twitter and certainly not LoudTwitter.

LoudTwitter used to take each tweet you made and post it as a separate blog entry to LiveJournal. It annoyed the hell of out of me. If I wanted to subscribe to your twitter stream then I would. I didn't like it when people brought a micro-blogging activity stream into my personal space/full blog attention area that was LiveJournal.

Then LoudTwitter made one simple but huge change. Instead of posting each tweet at a time it posted all of your daily tweets into LiveJournal (or other supported blogging platform) as a summary. I find this very useful! Rather than buzzing me with micro-blog posts in a full-blog environment I'm given a handy update of what someone was up to for any given day and that's exactly what LiveJournal was supposed to do.

That said; there are some etiquette suggestions that I'd like to make!

Pick a post time near midnight. Anything else is confusing and mis-leading.
Turn off @ replies. They belong on Twitter and not LiveJournal.
Hide the status link. They belong on Twitter and not LiveJournal.
Consider leaving both the beginning text and ending text options blank. They'll quickly become cumbersome, unnecessary clutter that gets in the way of the heart of the "LJ summary"
Change the Post Title occasionally to keep the LJ side of your twittering fresh.

My trolls and I

2008-06-27T12:51:00.000+01:00

This isn't a sulk. This is an observation. I'm a lucky guy. I work for a hugely successful digital marketing agency; we have over 200 staff, nearly a dozen offices and have ranked in the best place to work for two years in a row.

Here in the UK bigmouthmedia has really strong search positions too. We do well for the vanity phrase [search engine optimisation]. I know that annoys some people.

So, I'm a lucky guy but sometimes that luck attracts detractors and I just have to live with that.

For example, if you take the time to scroll down through recent blog posts and checkout the Outbrain star ratings you'll see that lots of my posts have been given 1/5. It could be that my blog posts suck (and yeah; Spore Creature Creator to draw search engine spiders... heh!) but I'm pretty sure those posts could have been about anything and would still have been given the 1/5 mark.

I owe Mixx some time but I've had a stint of trolling there too. Look at these minus results. On that occasion I know the detractors are a set of spammers that I'd marked down myself. I started that one.

I don't care. I really don't. What's inspired this post, however, was a junior member of staff asking me what was going on. They cared. They didn't like to see it happening. I suppose that's why competitor/detractors do it. It's childish but they'd like to mess with your head.

It's a sad truth that because we've been relatively successful that we'll attract resentment from competitors. It's even sadder when you see people wasting their time on petty campaigns. I think it's true to say that some people try and make a name for themselves by being known as that guy who slags off the successful company.

This doesn't just happen to me. I've seen people sling mud at the likes of Lisa Barone and Rand Fishkin (not that I'm comparing myself to either of those two) and what elevated both of those two in my estimations of them was the mature and responsible way that they each handled the criticisms.

Often the best thing to do is to simply ignore it (I'm not ranking my own posts with Outbrain, for example) but that can be frustrating when people spin three year old half-truths or simply act annoyingly!

The I's have it

2008-06-26T23:08:00.005+01:00

The letter "i" is hot in search. Loads of firms want to be i-this and i-that. Sounds easy... but is it? Let's try ranking agencies by the number of times they manage to use the letter I.

Five Is

Site Visibility

Three Is

Netizen Digital
Vivid Lime
Efficient Frontier

Two Is

Bigmouthmedia
iCrossing
Equi-Media
Euston Digital
Golley Slater Digital
Resolution Media
Altogether Digital

One I

Latitude
Media Contacts
Zed Media
Greenlight
DBD Media
Net Media Planet
Stickyeyes
Sitelynx
MediaCo
Click Consult
Harvest Digital
Clicks2customers
Strange Corporation
Coolpink
iProspect
Rusty Brick
I-Spy
iLevel

No Is

The Search Works
Steak
Cheeze
Guava
VCCP Search
Propellernet
Profero
TBG London
Tamar
77Agency
Ambergreen
Netrank
AccuraCast
NetBooster
Bruce Clay

So! Well done to Site Visibility and their mad collection of Is!

Disclaimer: This list is very British cos I put it together at about midnight and used the NMA list as inspiration. Plenty of Is in inspiration.

Gmail in Germany

2008-06-23T17:10:00.004+01:00

Remember how Google lost the right to use the name 'Gmail' in Germany and was even fined over it?

Look what happens when you try and use it anyway (while in Germany).

The text says;

We can't provide service under the Gmail name in Germany; we're called Google Mail here instead.

If you're traveling in Germany, you can access your mail at http://mail.google.com.

Oh, and we'd like to link the URL above, but we're not allowed to do that either. Bummer.

For general information about Google, please visit www.google.com or www.google.de.

Imagine not even being able to link to the alternative URL. Ouch.

Funky discoveries at SES Hamburg

2008-06-23T15:06:00.002+01:00

Funky!, originally uploaded by Bigmouthmedia.

This car was parked around the corner from SES Hamburg. It's far too funky not to photo and blog about!

I've uploaded a host of bigmouthmedia-centric photos for the bigmouthmedia Flickr account (see how that works?) for everyone to admire.

A sponsorship lasts the length of the event but a Universal Search rich photograph of the sponsorship lasts forever!

SES Hamburg: Search Around the World

2008-06-23T10:06:00.004+01:00

Rightyo - another go at live blogging. Today it's day #1 of SES Hamburg. Hamburg is a great city. Most of the conference is in German except for this panel and occasional presentation from myself who don't speak any German. Heck. I struggle to speak English.

Looks like a busy pane with five speakers. First up we have:

Burgio / Italy

Right. Sir. Mention SEMPO more than three times and you get -5 points.

Here's the first bullet point - Google rules (one SEMPO mention)

After Google we've got Yahoo/MSN fighting for second place. Then there's Virgilio/Alice next and the big publishing portals such as Kataweb Group, RCS and RAI (second SEMPO mention).

On the SEM/PPC front the same is true; it's all AdWords/AdSense. Yahoo's Panama is struggling to catch up and MIVA vanished. However, we're seeing people rest PPC options on sites like Facebook.

It's also the case that Italians - pushed by their agencies - are trying more social media.

Let's focus on the agencies for a while. We have the 'interactive agencies' who are moving towards web 2.0 but still forget the basic SEO. There are the 'media centers' who offer search but treat is as media purchase. There are 'in-house teams' who try and do SEO but struggle for training and resources. There are also the 'search marketing agencies' who offer the best service but many Italian businesses don't really want to pay the hefty fees that these agencies charge.

Ah... the Google story again. This seems to be a common problem. Google's Italian sales team will lure people straight into PPC and promise some level of optimisation. However, Massimo claims, they don't really deliver this.

Massimo has his hands on some Full6 research... but he's whizzing through it awfully quickly! More men than women use the internet/search in Italy and most go online at least once every day.

We see that Yahoo is by far and away the most popular second choice search engine. MSN's Live Search doesn't get a look in there.

Here's another quirky fact. 7% of Italians say they wouldn't go online to get information about something after finding out about it somewhere else.

41% of Italians will check on blogs before making a purchase. This explains the rising interest in social media in Italy.

71% of Italian users have never performed a search on a mobile. Massimo didn't translate it but I'm sure I saw a stat which said 4% of the survey respondents used the Sony PSP.

Hjorth / Europe wide

He begins with a slide showing all the languages in Europe. There are lots. That gives you the option not just to geo-target but to language-target. For example; you could target Catalan.

Let's look at character sets. Ah. Now there are only two on the map of Europe; latin and cyrillic.

Ooh. Risky jokes about there being two languages in Germany; German and Turkish.

Hjorth claims there is a German company with a link buying network which is impossible to detect. That's just wrong, though. You don't need to analysise the page to become aware of link buying trends.

We're looking at which search engines you might spend your budget on; Google, Google, Google... but let's look at some exceptions; there's Jubii in Denmark, Voila in France (but that's likely to go soon), Exalead in France and we laugh because AltaVista still lives in Sweden.

We whiz through people search engines like Spock.com, skip video search engines and come to look more closely at France.

94% of France have broadband and it's fast (400Me to 450Me). Anders top tip for bringing your search campaign to France is to get the basics right. The next top tip is to really use shopping search engines; Le Guide, Kelkoo, Achter Moins Cher, etc, etc.

PR is also important in France. There aren't many PR hubs but talk to bloggers and traditional journalists.

Oh. We're looking at a screen shot from YiGG. That's a German site so I guess we've left France. If you couldn't guess... YiGG is a digg clone.

Anders is running out of time so we're whizzing through slides fast enough to cause an epileptic fit!

Kevin reminds us that we'll be able to download the slides later. Phew!

Schmidt / Asia Pacific

Let's see how quickly Erica has to run through her slides! She only has 8 minutes. Go!

She quickly confirms that Google is the biggest search engine in Germany. Great. She asks us to suspend our knowledge about Search because its all different in Apac.

Let's look at some comScore stats - 21.3b queries in Dec 2007 Apac. That's huge!

The biggest markets;

China,
Japan,
India,
Korea

Baidu has 5.2% worldwide marketshare (that compares to 62.4% for Google and 12.8% for Yahoo). Naver has 2.6% worldwide marketshare thanks to Korea.

Some other apac search engines; Duam, Empas, Soso, Sohu and Naver.

Search in Apac isn't easy. I can tell from Erica's tone of voice that she's found this out first hand! In Hong Kong, for example, users search in Chinese, then English and then in combinations of both languages.

China

Baidu has 68% (though Erica notes these stats change hugely depending on source)
Google has 20%
SoSo has 4%
Yahoo has 2%
Sohu China has 2%

Erica shows the Baidu homepage to illustrate how similar it is to Google. The claim is that the Chinese are very good at copying!

Baidu is used heavily to look for free MP3s. There's even a tab for the search on Baidu. It's also worth noting that the Chinese aren't used to paying for MP3.

Google's users tend to be more business orientated than Baidu's users. Baidu is predominately paid search. The average user in China doesn't know (or care about) the difference between a paid listing and an organic listing.

Reasons why Google may find it hard in China; just a few years back the Chinese gov was automatically redirecting Google.cn traffic to China! Baidu say; "If you have an idea and are willing to pay for it - let's talk"

Japan

Yahoo is dominant in Japan. Yay for Japan. Here's the catch; the main shareholder of Yahoo Japan is not Yahoo. It's a telecom called SouthBank.

In Japan people are very used to paying for things with their mobile (cell) phone. The default engine on any DoCoMo device is Google.

Korea

Naver is top with 77% marketshare
Daum is next with 10.8% marketshare.
Yahoo has 4.4%
Then there's search engine called Google with just 1.7%

Naver was born as a 'Question & Answer' search engine and then grew from there. Naver is also very similar in appearance to Google but has a lot more paid search listings (partner; Overture).

Offline advertising is really used to drive search. It's the infamous Pontiac example again (pleas, someone ban this from SES and SMX).

Good one Erica! No rushed slides.

Kennedy / United States and Canada (SEO)

Anne must be shattered. She arrived here at 1am!

Anne starts by pointing out that Canada is bi-lingual. There's also the growing Spanish speaking market in the United States.

Anne tackles the question; if you're an European company why would you bother to try to market to Americans given the current economic climate? The answer; what about all those American living in the UK or elsewhere in Europe?

Two-thirds of Americans now shop online and e-Commerce accounts for $1 for every $10 spend across all retail channels in the US.

Anne rolls out the Enquiro eye-tracking charts. Thanks Anne. On the left we've got the golden triangle. On the right we've got the stretched out eye patterns we now associated with Universal Search.

37% of US adults use social media and 70% of teens use it every month (what do the other 30% do??)

Older people are sticky and the younger people are fickle.

There's not the same levels of concern about online privacy in the States than in Europe.

In summary; US market is still growing, universal search and social media are inspiring new tactics and businesses are eager.

Elesseily / Canada and United States (PPC)

Search is the largest online advertising medium. The US market is more than half the total PPC market... but that share is declining.

Elesseily asks; "What can we learn from North America??"

My first thought - how to spice up sports games by bringing in cheerleaders. Ah; Mona suggests multivariate testing.

True enough - not many people in the audience put their hands up for the question; "Who uses multivariate testing". Mona says that Page Zero tend to test 7 variables at once.

I guess GE are a Page Zero client as we're seeing the results of some of their multivariate testing. We can see the word "Get" is important. The conversion rates between "GE Dishwasher Parts" and "Get GE Dishwaster Parts" is significant.

Mona has a hit list of things to suggest testing

Headlines
Offers
Buy words
URL with www or without
Capital letters

It's also important to test your landing pages. We're going to look at NXPowerLite for this example; the old page converted at 17.9%. After the landing page revamp (designed to do better with eyetracking) and encourage people to download a free test - they had a 36.6% conversion rate. What an improvement!

Mona also plugs Andrew Goodman's book. Bet he's pleased about that!

Closing

Kevin Ryan plugs the bigmouthmedia fussball competition we're running. There are trophies, you know!

Ooh. Someone objects to me typing at the back of room. N00b!

Rare video footage of Slurp, Googlebot and MSNBot in the wild

2008-06-20T20:07:00.003+01:00

I should admit to two things. Firstly; I've been so busy I've not posted in a while. Secondly; I've been playing with Spore's Creature Creator for about an hour.

In the process of making a whole host of test monsters I've created...

Googlebot

MSNBot

Yahoo Slurp

Not only was Yahoo Slurp the first spider I created - it looks like the best. I don't know why both MSNBot and Googlebot went so dark! The good news is that I figured out I can use the scroll wheel to re-size limbs.

I may call these 1.0, release them into the wild and then try again...

Guardian Logo vs Google Logo

2008-06-03T12:10:00.003+01:00

I was reading Stephen Brook's write up of comments from Google's EMEA President, Nikesh Arora, that people would pay for web content when I noticed the favicons.

I don't normally read the Guardian because they're not a client!

I think both Google and the Guardian went to the school of curvy Gs! Google's new favicon logo is on the right.

Cristina Hoole leaves PayPal for LinkedIn

2008-06-02T15:49:00.002+01:00

I don't usually cover moves but this one looks interesting.

Cristina Hoole was once Head of Retail and Consumer PR at Visa Europe. She then then moved onto PayPal.

I know this is an HR role but we can see the 'new media' trend there; from the credit card to the dotcom.

She's moved again. I'm not sure what her job title at LinkedIn is (I assume Head of PR) but Clare O'Conner from Haymarket points out she's been given a clear European brief.

The other interesting thing to note that that Hoole will be working with LinkedIn's PR agency Chameleon PR. Chaemeleon won the LinkedIn work after it was decided the previous PR agency - Bite - had a conflict of interest. Bite was working with Facebook too.

It's a small world, isn't it?

Inspiration, Anyone? Microsoft's videos

2008-06-02T15:11:00.004+01:00

One of the dangers of going to a lot of conferences and expos is that you begin to see the same funny videos again and again.

Last year I really enjoyed the Break Up video from Microsoft Advertising but, oh boy, did I watch it to death. If you've not seen it - here is is:

The video is so popular that Microsoft is doing a sequel.. and have produced a trailor for the sequel. A trailor for an online ad. Hmm. Makes you think! Amusingly the video is called 'Inspiration, anyone?" Here is is:

Inspiration, anyone?
by geertdesager

Hat tip to Mel Carson for the news!

Android Demo

2008-05-29T09:31:00.001+01:00

This is why I don't have an iPhone (I love my iPod Touch, though) and why I'm not impressed by any of the new phones currently on the market here in the UK

Thanks

2008-05-28T22:18:00.004+01:00

It's been a good day.

First I noticed that the Mercurythread blog liked the new bigmouthmedia 'top secret' PDFs. That's important to me because Mercurythread has worked at a competing local search agency.

Sometimes. Not always but sometimes you can get the most insightful comments from people operate in the same space as you. I'm sure Mercurythread has observations on what we're doing wrong too but it's nice to see what we might be doing right.

Next up! Google is in the news again here in the UK because it's won first place in the Great Place to Work Institute. Here's the good news - bigmouthmedia also made the list. What the Institute does is rank the top 10 and then put the next 40 companies in the general 'Top 50 list'. That's where we are - and for the second year in a row.

Guess we have to work out what to do better next year!

It's also graduate night here in Edinburgh. We've an office full of job seekers (people we've invited in after talent scouting at some trade fairs) and we've got loads of hopefuls.

I handed out a questionnaire to the grads and look forward to tallying up the results!

Yahoo in Spain

2008-05-27T00:10:00.001+01:00

Yahoo in Spain, originally uploaded by Bigmouthmedia.

I thought Yahoo's advertising campaign in Spain had a certain... touch about it. :)

Matt Cutts to Robert Scoble to Noooo!

2008-05-21T23:26:00.007+01:00

I'm a new convert to Friendfeed. Like many of you I rushed to follow Matt Cutts there.

Now look what's happened...

I'm getting stuff from Robert Scoble and from his many friends floating down my friends stream.

Now; I like the sound of Scoble but I don't follow him on Twitter or elsewhere simply because he writes so much.

As he's a friend of Matt he also has these chances to pop onto my Friendsfeed. Hmm. Urm.

Ach well. Maybe he bookmarks less and maybe Friendfeed will filter/share as appropriately as it can!

Update: Someone just IM'd to suggest defriending Matt at Friendfeed. Ha! Like that's an option... don't you know search? :)

SMX Madrid - Target Global

2008-05-21T16:03:00.005+01:00

Ah; managed to find a power supply here in the huge Spanish conference centre and get some juice back in my laptop batteries - enough for a spot more live blogging.

Next up is the Target Global session. We've Matias Perel and Rand Fishkin speaking. Rand has sunglasses on his head and a beard - must be Spanish.

Do you know what... Matias looks a lot like Massimo Burgio. I wonder if there's been a last minute speaker change. Yep. No Matias.

Targeting US/English Language Regions

Rand promises less corny American jokes. Awww.

We kick off with Hitwise's market share graph they did for Search Engine Land. The one that shows Google with a huge 67.9% blue pie slice of the US market. Poor old Yahoo and Microsoft with just slivers. If I squint... oh, I think I can see... it's Ask.com.

Now the Hitwise chart for the UK. It's worse here; they have 73% with Google UK and 14% with Google.com. Yeah. Do the maths.

If you look at Western Europe - it's Google, ebay and Yandex. Hmm. Yandex? I wonder if someone in Moscow is currently sulking that they've just been lumped in with Western Europe.

In Canada Google has a 90% market share. Ouch.

In Oz and New Zealand - 90% Google too. That leaves Yahoo and nineMSN with about 5% each. Rand points out that Yahoo and MSN have their TV partnerships (7 for Yahoo and 9 for MSN).

Israel... go on, guess the number... yeah. It's 90%.

So! Is there anywhere Google doesn't rule?

China - Baidu 55%, Google 21.7% and Yahoo 7.2% Rand notes that when he was in China you could search at Google but get your results back in Baidu. The government was forcing the ISPs to do this... easy to see why Google might struggle.

Russia - Yandex 47.5%, Ramber... rumours that Yandex's share is much higher.

Japan - Yahoo, Google and MSN in that order. Searching is very vertical so lots of traffic goes straight to, for example, shopping pages.

Korea - Naver 72%, Duam 11% and Yahoo with 6%. Rand reckons the future of social search might be echoed here. When you type a query into Naver, before you see the SERPs, you get UGC answers.

Czech - Seznam 62%, Google 24%, Centrum 5%, Atlas 3% and Jyxo 0.5%

Also something about Estonia - but I blinked.

Rand says search engines look at the geographic location of your IP address. They look at the geographic association of your domain extension. He notes that .com, .org, .net have become English language centric.

The registrar information is also used. He says Danny's a hippy. On-page address information is also used.

Language can be used too but can be frustrating. Take Spanish, for example, there are a lot of people in the US and Latin America who write in Spanish and then Google assumes they're targeting Spanish users.

Rand toys with the idea of targeting SEOMoz to just Spanish traffic. :)

Ah... on to the challenge of targeting two or more countries via Google's WMC. It's true that you can't do it on one domain but you can register two folders (or more) and geo-target them.

Why doesn't Google use the Dublin Core meta tags for language/country targeting? Not enough sites use them.

What's important for Google?
- trusted domains
- trusted links; Rand reckons 1 or 2 trusted links can be more useful than 500 other links
- the dreaded sandbox; Rand reckons we'll see more of this in languages Google's not so confident in

What's important for Baidu?
- phone up Baidu and buy the organic traffic
- lots of traffic is multimedia centric

What's important for Yandex?
- similar to Google but less influence on domain trust
- rumours that you can ring up and buy changes...

What's important for Naver
- be social; get the community to write about you

What's important for Yahoo Japan
- it uses Yahoo search technology
- some focus on domain authority
- some focus on keyword use
- slightly easier to game

What's important in local engines (Seznam, etc)
- talk to a locals

Targeting the US
- competition levels very high; with the exception of some UK results
- best spam detection
- best spammers
- lots of link evaluation; lots of links discounted

The US population expects a high level of user experience. You need to do well here in order to get those editorial citation links. This is why blogging is popular.

Rand says he's not a monkey.

Here's a big question; Why am I ranking well in one enigne but not others?
Here are Rand's answers;
- different weighting of links
- different crawling/indexing index - Google is more robust; Yahoo & MSN are more flaky
- different keyword usage limits - easy to go overboard on Google
- different ways to measure 'valuable vs thin content'
- sometimes historical issues with the domain or IP address can cause problems

Getting Local Results from Anywhere in the World
- Rand shares the &GL=<country> trick with the audience
- ie; &GL=US or &GL=DE (for Google)
- for Yahoo; simply go to the country specific domain

And that's a wrap! Now onto the questions.

... oh. Wait. Massimo's talking about SEMPO again.

SMX Madrid - Target Europa

2008-05-21T12:56:00.004+01:00

Oohkay; let's see if I need the translation headsets for this one. Next up I believe we are talking about targeting Italy and the Netherlands. Speaking we have Lennert de Rijk (Netherlands) and Massimo Burgio (Italy). The panel is going to try and take questions on the German market too.

The Netherlands

Ah yes; Lennert is speaking in English. Good man. +5 points already. He's Dutch and works in Spain. He's the Managing Director and cofounder of Onetomarket Spain. I wonder how many languages he speaks?

Let's see if his presentation on the Netherlands is as good as Joost's was for SES New York! Ha. :)

The Netherlands are 2nd in the world for broadband penetration. The Dutch spend about 6.4 hours online a week.

He doesn't understand the costing structure of telephone/internet usage in the Spain. The Spannish pay x4 more and have worse quality. He suggests that this is one of the reasons why internet shopping is larger in the Netherlands than in Spain (If you're not European; Spain is a large country and the Netherlands is not).

Ah! A picture of a cow. This is to remind us that agencies should have a global mindset but must act locally. All of the major players in the Netherlands are local - although iProspect just bought one of the market leaders.

Don't use Kelkoo. He says. He recommends using "ormaspdsfsdfsdffdf" or "asmdsfhdsfsdsdf" instead. Okay; I can't quite pronounce or spell the sites he recommends.

Also TradeDoubler, he says, aren't really getting into the Netherlands. Lennert says that TradeDoubler simply doesn't have the knowledge or marketshare to work as an affiliate network in the Netherlands (If you're not European; TradeDoubler is a large pan-Europen affiliate network).

Lennert describes the Dutch market as immature. It's growing quickly and expected to keep on growing.

Here's a fact for you; elderly people use the net more often than young people in the Netherlands. This is due to the demographic situation where there are simply loads of 65+ people and that they have the time and money to spend online.

Last year, on average, Dutch users would spent at least 500 euros online.

This is interesting; the leading vertical of spend in the Netherlands is travel and Lennert's included 'insurance' in that group. There doesn't seem to be a finance vertical of note.

This is a similar picture to the UK. In recent years we've seen the pure plays shops get their act together for online and start to take marketshare back from aggregators and affiliates.

Top sites in the Netherlands; Google.nl, Startpagina.nl, Marktplaats.nl, Live.com, Msn.com, Postbank.nl, nl.wikipedia and then hyves. Hyves is a popular social network in northern europe/the nordics.

Startpagina et al are the always popular 'starting pages' who simply refuse to go away in the Netherlands. Lennert urges us to be careful with the Startpagina clones as they're nothing more than link farm clones which mess up your link profiles and which have started to suffer drops in Google.

Some Dutch basics;
- use .nl domains
- host locally
- get local links
- be as aggressive as you need to be (Andrew's note; there's a Faith No More song about that)

The Dutch home shopping organisation (thuiswinkel.org) is important. It has 750 members and 100 business partners. It represents 80% of the Dutch home-shopping market. Oh... wait, I think Lennert has a connection to these guys.

Lennert would like us to remember that the Netherlands are neither Belgium or Germany. Yes; the Netherlands and Belgium have a language in common but the culture is very different.

Are there any other search engines after Google? Nah. Not really.

How do you get a Dutch person (or user?) to love you? Be unique, Lennert says. (Slide shows Dutch beauty blowing a kiss (lucky kiss)).

Hyves has 4 million users. 2 million of these people are Dutch. That's 2 billion page views.

NuJij has 1 million users. That's about 4 million page views.

74% of the Dutch are on at least one social network.

Right. That's Lennert finished. Now for Massimo!

Italy

Before he starts - I bet Massimo plugs SEMPO Italy.

Win. Massimo's plugging SEMPO Italy.

... still plugging SEMPO.

Right. Now on to Italy.

Italy take 2

Google is big there. They're the market leader with Yahoo and MSN coming second. After that we've got Virgilio (an Italian directory) and Alice.

There are big publisher portals - kataweb group, RCS and RAI.

However, despite these big publishers and alternative portals there is only really AdSense and AdWords.

Panama is slowly gaining a little more traction but have very far to go.

MIVA disappeared from Italy. Facebook offers some PPC alternatives. Massimo doesn't recommend trying Facebook just for PPC campaigns... got to use it for social media strategies instead.

Massimo says that the interactive agencies in Italy have rushed to embrace Web 2.0 stuff but have forgotten their SEO basics on the way. There are some in-house SEO teams in Italy but they have neither the training nor the resources.

The Italian search agencies are working very well. Massimo thinks the agency fee is a problem, though, as the Italian clients don't really want to pay that. He says he adores Google Italy but hates the way they simply act as sales people. There are only six people in Google Italy, they're only sales people and can't solve your problems (reading between the lines; Google Italy are promising to run SEM campaigns for clients directly and Massimo doesn't rate their ability).

Turns out there are Googlers in the room. Massimo changes slide. :) (Actually Massimo ; there's an Italian Googler in the room and within throwing distance - if I shout duck then duck!)

The evolution of search in Italy;
- from SEO all the way through to SMO
- SERP rankings - blogs + social media (says Massimo)
- universal search = social search
- PPC = lead acquisition

Social media is of increasing importance in Italy. We're also seen an increase in Web TV and mobile ready users (thanks to the iPhone once again).

Germany

Thomas Bindl can't make it so we're going to adhoc...

Germany's internet market is more advanced than Spain. The Travel and Retail verticals in particular are much larger.

Some popular German social networks
- JUX.de
- StayFriends
- SevenLoad
- MyVideo
- Mister Wong
- StudiVZ

Tomy says Mister Wong is good for links as the site doesn't use nofollow. Er... I think they added nofollow some months ago. Tomy did warn the audience that he hadn't been active in Germany for a few months though and so that makes sense.

Alex (surname?) works for a search agency active in both Germany and Spain. He's here to walk us through some search campaign differences.
- Germany is more saturated than Spain; this effects the bid costs
- You can't transplant a campaign from one European country to another; you must localise
- Germany is more sober than Spain. German creatives need to be more technical.
- In Spain, Alex's agency uses 'flashy' landing pages designed to capture the users' attention
- In Germany, Alex's agency uses more conservative landing pages
- When data harvesting; in Spain you can ask for it, get it and know everything about the user - in Germany no one knows their national ID number
- It takes more effort to persuade a German to part with their money
- Spanish customers are easier to keep happy. If you can show a Spanish client you're doing well - then they'll keep the PPC campaign going.

Thanks guys! I'll not live blog any of the questions and answers and keep them exclusive to the conference instead.

SMX Madrid - The Programmble Social Web

2008-05-21T12:02:00.003+01:00

Right. I've found some (weak) wi-fi and a set of translation headphones (currently buzzing in my ear) so I'm going to see whether I can do some live blogging from SMX Madrid.

It's 1 o'clock Madrdid time and next up is Eric Tholome from Google. He's the Group Product Manager, Applications there and I think he's going to be talking about open social. The title of the presentation is "The Programmable Social Web". He looks to have at least 7 slides - which is loads for a Googler in a search conference.

Google are also presenting in the other room but I can't get translation for that. Sorry Luisella!

Okay... so far Tomy's speaking in Spanish. No translation!

Oh! Success. The translation software is perfect for Eric... no wait, he's speaking in English! Score. :)

Wow. A patchwork of 10,000 gadgets! These logo swarm slides get bigger for each conference. Who had the time to put this together?

Eric talks about phase 0. Destination websites. Web 1.0.

Then there's phase 1. Users creating their own sites by taking content form one site (RSS) and building their own pages with it. For example; iGoogle.

Phase 2. People start taking applications (rather than just content) from one source and building their own stuff with them. For example, iGoogle evolves from just being RSS modles to showing apps.

Phase 3. Containers - those sites who can host gadgets - start to appear everywhere. For example; combining a real estate gagdet with a map gadget.

Phase 4. The applications evolve into 'creative applications' - really clever and impressive looking ones. For example; IM Google gadgets or Starbuck's interactive map gadget or Honda's sponsorship of Fall Out Boy through the gadget ad. (P.S. Google are keen to push gadget ads)

Eric notes that the web has become an eco system for gadgets.

Under a slide called "Everyone's Writing Code" Eric shows a curve going up that takes data from iGoogle. It shows that they've now got about 20,000+ gadgets and 100,000 sites acting as containers for gadgets. The curve goes up as it plots gadget numbers against time.

Guess what - there's a longtail of gadgets too. Google data; 50% of traffic comes from outside the top 125 gadgets (that's taken from a base of 500 gadgets).

Woot! Google uses a slide that shows a dinosaur, then an asteroid and then a mammal; here comes the evolution of the web speach (I hope he mentions the Flying Spaghetti Monster intelligent design theory too - just to balance things).

Ah... yes; the shift to the browser being the next operating system of choice (I think I can hear someone in Microsoft HQ weeping).

So... roll in OpenSocial. Why is it important? Google says the web is better if the web is social. Eric notes how annoying it was to always have to re-add your friend data whenever you started a new site. He admits that Facebook has been very important. OpenSocial is here to let many social sites have access to not only a gadget eco-system but also to this common set of social data.

Eric stresses that Google doesn't want all the social sites to merge. They want OpenSocial bridge the gap between networks.

OpenSocial allows more applications to be developed. Rather than spend time writing conversion code so aps can run on different sites - the time can be spent writing more aps. It also means that more websites can run more aps. The result? More users will be able to experience the joy of applications.

OpenSocial is not GoogleSocial. It's very much, Eric says, a partner driven project. MySpace and Yahoo, for example, are partners. (Hey; if I was Google I might look into advertising on MySpace and Yahoo... oh... wait. Um.)

PayPal's in OpenSocial. NewsGator. CurrentTV. - Wah. He had a slide of small print that listed lots of OpenSocial partners. I hope I had time to cherry pick three good examples.

There are 5 categories of OpenSocial API
1) People and Friends (access friend info via API)
2) Activities (what friends are doing API)
3) Persistance (Store and share API)
4) Gadgets core (utilities)
5) Gadgets Feature-Specific (interface utlities; flash, for example)

What is Shindig? An apache license container which allows you to serve OpenSocial applications. It takes a little work but not that much. It's open source. Ning is a champion example.

Google are introducing REST APIs for OpenSocial - coming later, working on now - becase not everyone has a JavaScript enviorment.

Eric won't go into more details here but the REST APIs will also allow OpenSocial to go mobile.

So, what about Friend Connect? This helps every site provide some social features with just a snippet of code. In the past you had to use something like Shindig which, of course, meant you had to do some programming. Friend Connect makes its easier to get started with OpenSocial - you just need a few snippets of code from Friend Connect.

Once on Friend Conect you can;
- user registration
- invitations
- members gallery
- message posting
- reviews
- OpenSOcial applications

So, a possible summary here is that Friend Connect is here to help encourage OpenSocial adoption.

What do users get from Friend Connect?
- log in with existing credentials
- see who among their friends are already registered at the site
- invite friends from other social networks

Eric uses the Ingrid Michaelson example. She's a singer and not a coder. Just a few snippets of code from her friends at Friend Connect allows her to enhance her site. We can see that Eric (who uses a Calvin icon!) is logged in to her site and that Ingrid has added the iLike application to her site.

Google are making sure users stay in control of their data. Privacy is important. That's a key point to remember as Friend Connect and OpenSocial lets visitors use one set of data to log into lots of places.

Ah... OpenSocial is not just for friends. There's an Enterprise potential which Google reckons is largely untapped. Business partners can interact. Eric asks us to imagine a sales person on OpenSocial (actually, Eric, I can... not sure I want sales people stalking me on OpenSocial...)

Let's look at some business sites in the OpenSocial partnership; LinkedIn, SalesForce, Viadeo, Xing and Orcale. Not bad, huh?

Eric's wrapping up with some resource URLs. You can find the Google ones easily so here's Shindig; incubator.apache.org/shindig.

Thanks Eric!

Running WebPosition Gold? Using RankChecker? Go to jail.

2008-05-17T20:00:00.006+01:00

The story of Megan Meier is terrible and tragic. The poor girl killed herself as a result of cyberbulling at MySpace.

Her neighbour, Lori Drew, had created a fake persona at MySpace and used it to torment her.

It took US prosecutors nearly two years to find a law they could bring to bare against Lori Drew. In the end, they prosecuted Drew for hacking/unauthorised access - creating a fake account at MySpace breaks their terms and conditions for access. The Register express concerns that this could make us all criminals.

Google's terms and conditions expressly forbid tools which use automated queries. Google says in its help section that WebPosition Gold shouldn't be used. The same applies to other rank checkers like RankChecker or even PageRank checking scripts. A number of FireFox extensions come to mind as well.

The precedent set by the Lori Drew case means that, in theory, you could be sent to jail for ignoring Google's T&Cs.

Google gets funky in Taiwan

2008-05-16T10:20:00.002+01:00

Today's logo in Google Taiwan

Update: Ha-ha! Said image is also now pretty much world wide! Thanks timezones.