The short answer to the question, “Do I Need To Comply?” is “Yes” and you do need to make changes to your site. If what you wanted to hear was a “Maybe” or a “No”, then I’m afraid you’re just going to have to read the rest of this post to find out how to mitigate the impact where you can.

The Effective Deadline Is May 25th 2012

In the UK, the Cookie legislation, as well as privacy issues and email legislation, are overseen by a body known as the Information Commissioner’s Office or ICO. The UK legislation technically came into force on the 25th May 2011 through an Act of Parliament known by the snappy name of “The Privacy And Electronic Communications (EC Directive) (Amendment) Regulations 2011.”

However, businesses were given a full year to comply, which therefore means compliance is needed by the 25th May 2012.

In its guidance document, ICO explains that, “These are not rules designed to restrict the use of particular technologies as such, they are intended to prevent information being stored on people’s computers, and used to recognize them via the device they are using, without their knowledge and agreement.”

The most important word in that quote, and in the document itself is “Consent”. Generally speaking, you can assume that if you warn users that you are using Cookies to do anything at all, and then give them the opportunity to opt in and accept the use of cookies, then you are pretty much guaranteed to be compliant. In fact, that is pretty much the whole of the regulation summarized in one paragraph!

ICO Demonstrates Its Own Use Of Consent For Cookies

So why not just do that?

Well, the key problem is that a typical website uses not just one but several cookies and each one would need to be accepted by the user. Even the UK’s ICO does accept that “Implementing these rules requires considerable work in the short term but compliance will get significantly easier with time.” Compliance could involve changing many systems and incurring considerable effort and cost.

We mustn’t forget that virtually all major tracking and analytics systems depend on cookies, so the non-use of cookies would create a further degree of inaccuracy in the data lovingly analysed by us all.

So how do we obtain consent in order to comply with the legislation? The first main point is that consent has to be “Opt In,” it cannot be implied. The user has to knowingly accept the use of the cookie.

Note these words in ICO’s guidance document, “It is not enough simply to continue to comply with the 2003 requirement to tell users about cookies and allow them to opt out. The law has changed and whatever solution an organisation implements has to do more than comply with the previous requirements in this area.”

Sending Users To Browsers To Change Settings Is Not Enough

The ability to change browser settings is also specifically mentioned as a route which can be used to achieve compliance – but this also doesn’t mean that you can simply rely on the user’s ability to change their settings themselves.

In order for browser settings to be a suitable form of compliance, the website must identify that their browser is set up to allow cookies of certain types (but not others) and there must be some form of prompt, a pop-up message for example, where the user can confirm their acceptance of or implement a change of the settings. The Commissioner, however, does not think that this will be a suitable route of compliance for some time.

By the way, these regulations apply to ALL cookies, so you cannot say that your cookie expires at the end of a session to comply.

The “Strictly Necessary” Defence

There is only one significant means of complying with the legislation which allows a website publisher not to seek the consent of users and that is if the cookie is “Strictly Necessary”.

This applies when the functionality of the website cannot be achieved without the cookie such as keeping the contents of a shopping cart available for a combined purchase at the end of the process.

However, it has been made very clear that the “Strictly Necessary” rule does NOT apply to analytics.

Gaining Consent At Login

ICO clearly expects that websites where a login is required to use services, that the login will identify if cookies need to be used and will give the user the opportunity to tick a box to ensure compliance. However, this consent needs to be sought before or immediately after cookies are used — a delay is not regarded as satisfactory.

What If I Host Outside The UK?

Neither the law or the guidance is very clear in this respect. If the organization is UK-based, the laws will clearly apply whether the website is hosted in the UK or overseas. Those corporations outside the UK or Europe are advised that their users in the UK will expect clear information about cookies too.

What Action Will Be Taken For Non-Compliance

The Information Commissioner at ICO has said that ICO will take a proportionate response which seems to be mean that organizations will first be given the opportunity to comply. But be aware that penalties of up to £500,000 can be applied by the commissioner to offenders.

Best To Audit Your Cookies Now

By the way, ICO’s recommendation is that you undertake a full audit of the cookie’s you use now to ensure you comply with the law. Such an audit involves checking:

• Which cookies are used?
• What’s the purpose of the cookies?
• Do cookies link to other personal information?
• What data do the cookies hold?
• Session cookie or persistent?
• Lifespan of the cookie?
• First or third party?
• Check your privacy policy covers your cookie use?

One thing is clear: you need to provide very obvious and clear references to cookies on your website as a bare minimum – hiding this information in the privacy policy will definitely not wash!

Nor is Google without blame. I started digging into Google’s figures expecting to find that Google had actually seen a fantastic success at the end of 2011 – but had miscommunicated this with the city.

There is some truth in this but it is, by no means, the whole story. Google didn’t and doesn’t communicate fantastically with city slickers – but there are also some surprises in the figures when you look beyond the headlines.

A Wall Street Communications Issue Or The Figures?

On its webcast, where Google explained its figures, there was some puzzlement over an 8% drop in the value of clicks combined with a 34% increase in the number of clicks.

This definitely worried some analysts – it’s a complicated piece to explain and Google didn’t say, “The value of our inventory dropped, but we sold much more inventory” which actually might have been a better presentation of the truth.

However, looking at the figures in more depth what was interesting was that Google seems to have performed relatively better in the US during the last quarter growing by 12.7% over the previous quarter. The UK grew by just 1.6% quarter on quarter and the rest of world managed just 6.8%.

However, last year at the same time, Google was reporting 15% growth in the US, 4.5% in the UK and 19.85 in the rest of the world – so there does appear to be some softening of growth.

Share Of Google Revenue By Region Q411

When you look at the growth rates over time on the chart below, it all becomes a little clearer. Growth is “drooping” in the US and the UK, but has fallen back very sharply by some 15.7 percentage points in the rest of the world. Now, not many folks would sniff at an almost 30% (29.5%) rate of growth internationally, but this is the city we’re talking about.

In its announcement, Google talked about launching new ad formats which had reduced the revenue per click – analyst hearts could be heard beating faster.

Then like me, they popped the new growth rates they’d just heard into tracking spreadsheets and spotted the droop. Whoops. 2 + 2 = 15. Or rather, new ad formats + decline in revenue per click = seriously worrying downward trend.

International Growth Rates Q411

You will recall that Larry Page worried the city on his first set of figures by revealing huge growth in sales and marketing costs and in the headcount of people employed by Google?

The promise was all to do with what he now terms “velocity”. He wanted to get Google’s core products to a wider audience faster, before the doors closed and the first mover advantage was gone.

So are we seeing an appropriate return from the that investment? The uptick in investment started at the beginning of 2010, as you can see below. Would you expect a return by the end of 2011 and roughly 8 quarters?

The Investment In Marketing & People Must Show Results

People I’ve spoken to about changes in search technology tell me it can be as long as two years before you see the fruits of your labor.

So we should really have seen it by the end of 2011 and mid-2012 will definitely have to show some serious uplift if Larry Page’s dream is not to begin to be heavily questioned by analysts and shareholders. The stopwatch is running, the finish line is in site and at the moment Google isn’t going to hit the tape as it should.

Google Headcount And Sales Marketing Q411

But it also seems that Larry Page and Patrick Pichette, CFO have already spotted the danger as you can see above. The rate of growth in headcount and in sales and marketing costs softened already in the last quarter of 2011. Don’t forget though, these figures are percentages – the spend is still growing, but now by less than the company is growing.

Turning to the topic of inventory and the value of a click, Google has been providing up and down percentages for sometime, so below you’ll see a model based on all clicks having a value of 50 cents at the beginning of 2009.

In fact, the shape of the graph doesn’t vary regardless of the value – but it doesn’t affect the average value axis which is not shown here because it is simply a guess.

Average Google Value Per Click Q411

What you can see from the chart above is that in fact there has been a two quarter drop in the value of clicks which has the result that a click today has roughly the same value it did back in the depths of the 2009 recession. The clicks volume has naturally increased to compensate.

This is potentially good news for smaller businesses and for adaptible search marketers since if there are many more clicks to fight for at lower value – there will be opportunities for some to capture leads or business and to really make a mark.

Google's Rough Market Share Outside US And UK Q411

The above chart warrants some explanation and some words of caution. We are only looking at Google, Baidu and Yandex figures to create the shares above and are ignoring Seznam, Naver and Yahoo-bing.

However, even when those figures are added back in, it is unlikely this picture would be that much different. Google is the clear leader in the rest of the world (excluding US and UK) but it’s share does appear to eroding very slightly at the edges.

Is Google Affected By Fear Of Losing Leadership?

Google will have much more data and analysis than this – but it might well explain the behavior of the company in terms of its sales and marketing and recruitment efforts.

One of the latest Googleplexes to open was in Paris for the purpose of targeting the Middle East and Africa, for instance.

Rough Search Market Size Rest Of World Q411

$22 Billion – Now That Is Good News!

There is also definitely good news for international search marketers in Google’s figures and in the chart above. The global search market (yes with a little display inter-mingled) is at least $22 billion!

Most recently Scott Thompson was the President of PayPal and is credited, especially within the Yahoo announcement press release, as “Driving customer engagement built on strong technology platforms.” But much of the chatter around Wall Street has questioned Mr. Thompson’s ability to grow a “media” business when the focus of his experience has been around technology.

Is Yahoo A Media Or Technology Company?

For a search engine, this would be a ridiculous statement the equivalent of saying, “If Google is now a media company, it doesn’t need to invest in algorithms to decide on rankings.” After all, as Sean Corcoran of Forrester Research recently said in a Search Marketing Now webinar, “Technology is the new creative”.

But what of the global perspective? The good news is that at PayPal, Scott Thompson has been working in a global environment much more so even that it’s parent company eBay. PayPal has some 104 million active users in 190 countires worldwide.

Will Yahoo Dispose Of Prize Assets In Asia?

His brief at Yahoo is to continue the strategic review process the business has been going through and to “Identify the best approaches for the company and its shareholders.”

The Yahoo release poignantly continues, “Yahoo is considering a wide range of opportunities for the company’s business, as well as specific investments or dispositions of assets.”

Yahoo Taiwan Currently Remains In The Yahoo Stable

The dispositions of assets relates mainly to an area of great interest to international search marketers like me. Yahoo was one of the great international successes of the last decade but sadly failed to capitalize on some huge successes. Now the discussion is all about Yahoo disposing of those international assets and potentially, through certain asset swaps, becoming much more of a domestic US company.

I sincerely hope that Scott Thompson does not fall for this crazy idea. It amounts to saying, “Because you messed up a few things recently, why don’t you sell of your prize international possessions and focus instead on the market where you’re less competitive.”

Yahoo Owns $14 Billion In Its Alibaba Stake

One of Yahoo’s principal global assets is its share in Alibaba — the Chinese giant business-to-business match making site — where Yahoo owns 43% of the shares. This asset alone Yahoo valued at $14 billion in October.

Meanwhile, the founder of and chief executive of Alibaba, Jack Ma, had expressed an interest in buying Yahoo rather than just the shares that Yahoo owned in his own company.

Alibaba Is A Major Player In China Giving Yahoo A Great Foothold

This looks less likely now and talk is of an asset swap which might involve gaining assets in the US or Yahoo reducing its stake in Alibaba from 43% to 15%. One mooted plan is that Alibaba buys the Weather Channel and then swaps it for the Yahoo shares in Alibaba — this apparently is a tax efficient way to achieve the result.

Yahoo Japan, which for years has been the leading search engine in Japan, is jointly owned with Softbank Corp. In a bizarre turn of events, last year it switched its search support from Yahoo and its alliance with Microsoft, to have its organic results and ads powered by Google, giving Google first and second spot in the significant Japanese market.

Yahoo Japan Is A Leading Search Player In Asia

Other uses of “Overture” the older version of Yahoo ads included Naver in Korea who have since switch to their own system. Meanwhile, Yahoo in Hong Kong and Taiwan are going strong.

Amongst all of this talk, not much is said about Yahoo returning to any kind of role in search — other than through its international sales teams recruiting advertisers for Microsoft-Bing. Does that potential exist? I think it does…

Yahoo Hong Kong Is A Wholly-Owned Yahoo Asset

Yahoo needs a formula to give it a purpose in life and I cannot see how being a “media” company can ever give it a distinctive purpose as a former technology company. So, perhaps Scott Thompson would like a few suggestions from me (ironic smile)?

Will The Real Yahoo Stand Up

Yahoo is not really a media company. Yahoo is no longer a search company. Yahoo is not really an email company. Yahoo is not a social network. But Yahoo does have aspects of all these — so what should it do.

Here’s what I think:

• Yahoo should reinstigate the directory which made it famous! There is still a role for that!
• Yahoo should merge all of its diverse assets under a single brand — in other words Flickr should become Yahoo images!
• Yahoo should hang onto its international foothold — somehow, anyhow — especially when so many are desperate to get a slice of the Chinese market.
• It should treat display advertising as an extension of search advertising increasing the level of intelligence used to target ads
• It should expand and combine its Q & A sites and invest in the technology of how it provides “answers”. There is a growing need for that too!
• Yahoo needs a powerful suite of mobile solutions fast!

Good luck Scott Thompson!

In fact, digging deeper into the announcement produces new worries and potential new solutions for international SEOs.

For instance, whilst it may not have been Google’s intention, they’re presenting this as a “stronger signal than canonicals”, and give scenarios for its use which many did not even know existed as potential danger areas — including me.

Google Announces Multilingual Markup Scheme

The Two Big Elephants Of Global SEO

So, let’s try and walk through this in a logical way so we can all grasp what’s going on. Firstly, there are two big related issues which have plagued international SEO for years, namely:

• Dealing With Duplication
• Correctly Geo-Targeting A Site

In addition, Google has been under pressure for some time from large global corporates concerned that their global website costs were escalated by the needs of the Google algorithm — because of the impacts on translation costs.

So there are also two further translation issues:

• Costs Associated With Creating Specific Country Translations
• Dealing With Multi-Language User Generated Content

Dealing With Duplication

I’ll take each of these in turn to clarify what’s involved starting with “Duplication”. A problem with content that is duplicated arises because Google’s algorithm naturally throws out all copies apart from the “Best” or “Most Original”.

This is fine if you’re working on content for one country only, but if you need to show the same content for countries which all speak the same language then it starts to become challenging.

It’s important to note that, to date, this issue has applied only to copies of content that were in the same language. I’ll explain later why this distinction is important.

The main issue with duplication is actually that marketers need to show the correct country content to that country at the moment that user finds their site via Google.

Showing them the wrong country could provide them with incorrect contact details or pricing which potentially reduce their conversion performance or effectively deliver poor customer service.

Correctly Geo-Targeting A Site

Correctly geo-targeting a site means that when a user searches for an organization within a particular Google local domain, the site shows up and has not been filtered out because Google thinks it relates to a different country.

This is particularly important in the “Page From” and “Pages In {Language}” user filters on the left of the page. If user searches for you via “Pages From Norway” for instance, and you have a Norwegian operation, you definitely do want your site to show up in the rankings.

Costs Associated With Creating Specific Country Translations

Large corporations invest billions of dollars in translations and often not very productively. There are two solutions to this problem which can help with the cost namely using the same “World Language Content” multiple times or adopting machine translation techniques.

For example, it’s very common for global sites to use only translate their content into Spanish once and to deliver that same Spanish to all countries needing that language equally. As there are at least 20 countries speaking Spanish, the could mean 20 copies of the same content on the same site at the same time. Yep, we’re duplicating.

To avoid the duplication, we might use local domains to help (I can confirm that does help) or we might translate a fresh copy for each country — or more commonly, for the major ones which we consider significant.

Dealing With Multi-Language User Generated Content

If you’re site is a forum or Q&A style site that operates internationally, you face the problem that your users are generating content in one language that you might wish to share with users in other languages.

Almost all organizations facing this problem opt to use auto-generated translation techniques; but unfortunately this has begun to fall foul of the Panda algorithm which searches out poor quality content based on machine learning and pattern techniques. Frequently, auto-translated content looks like really bad spam!

The Solution Google Is Offering

With the new markup, Google is putting forward a different way of solving these problems. At a later point, I will look at the broader issues of combining this approach with Webmaster Central geo-targeting and the use of local domains, but for now we’ll stick to the markup option.

Back in February 2009, Google first launched the Canonical markup tag supported also by both Bing and Yahoo. The main purpose of the canonical tag was to add code on the page to indicate to the search engine the “Canonical” of the page. In other words, to indicate to the search engine which was the most important copy of the page which should be shown to users.

Later, the canonical tag was given cross-domain capabilities which extended its reach into the multilingual world — but there it suddenly ran into some significant limitations.

If you used the rel=canonical tag to solve duplication issues, you had to choose which one was the “Top” URL which meant you could be showing UK content in Australia or Argentinian pages to the Spanish.

Targeting The Right Part Of Google Involves Understanding Google Geographic Filters

Where The New Tag Comes In

Let’s imagine that in our scenario where you’ve denominated, using rel=canonical, that a certain page is the “master content”.

What you’ve now done is “Deduplicated” it! In other words, you’ve given an indication to Google that a particular piece of content is necessarily duplicated and you’ve indicated which is the original.

What you’ve not done is indicated which version of that now-known-to-be-duplicate content should be shown where.

The rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en” version of the Hreflang tag enables you to say, “This is for Australia, this is for the UK!” We can also assume that without “Hreflang”, the top content — perhaps the UK version — would be linked to by both sets of Google results.

So to recap, rel=canonical deduplicates and rel=alternate hreflang denotes the geo-targeting. Simple.

Not Quite So Simple

Don’t forget, we also have Webmaster Central geo-targeted settings in the background and they’re useful because you can geo-targeting a whole site, folder or sub-domain to a particular country.

With the “rel=tag thingies”, you have to specify the settings on a per URL basis which involves considerably more effort and cost than the use of global settings at Webmaster Central.

However, the rel=”alternate” hreflang has the advantage that it can be deployed alongsider ccTLDs or local domains. This makes eminent sense and prevents people thinking they have to use a dot com to target when in fact ccTLDs achieve better results.

Where Site Content Is “Fully Translated?”

In the rel=”alternate” annoucement and Webmaster help pages, Google gives as an example scenario the denomination of targeting for a German and for an English URL — the question is why? A German translation of an English text is by definition not a duplicate, unless you re-translate it back and re-compare. So why would Google show this example?

The use case Google describes is, “Multiregional websites using fully translated content, or substantially different monolingual content targeting different regions. Example: a product webpage in German, English and French”. So it is clear that Google would like us to use this tag to denote content even if it’s not in the same language.

Other commentators have concluded that Google is telling us that translated content “Can Be Duplicate”. I doubt this because I cannot see what the purpose might be from Google’s point of view.

Studying The Non-Duplicate Use Cases

There are other cases where indicating which language a page’s content is deemed to be in could be useful:

• To indicate dynamic machine translation
• To identify content in English to be translated

Machine translation is known to raise red flags to visiting Panda crawlers because of their preference for correct gramatical and properly flowing natural language — in the same way that real life Panda’s are very fussy about eating natural bamboo shoots and nothing else!

Denominating your content as machine translated and linking it to one original source could be used in Panda as a means of giving additional authority to the content even if doesn’t really flow very naturally at all and would normally be discarded. (Less politely said, “Your content is rubbish dude but we’ll let it pass…”)

Equally, some websites hold content in English and translate the content dynamically — such as multi-country forums for example. That content may be seen by the crawler as another copy of English to be discarded, unless it is denoted as “German” which is the language it would be displayed in once a user had “demanded” the content to load.

Using the alt=”alternate” hreflang could help Google understand this process algorithmically.

Canonical Involves Guesswork — Not Any More

The result? I’m already thinking that this opens up so many options we’d better be increasing that hour’s training we’re currently providing to explain geo-targeting, to a full-day as the potential variations have now expanded exponentially! By the way, if anyone has any updates do let me know via the comments!

I have wasted so much of my time on this planet saying “Do Not Translate Your Keywords” and still every day I see or hear of examples of international SEM or SEO campaigns where doing that has been part of sowing the seeds of failure of that campaign.

A Case Study In “Localizing” Keywords

That word “Localizing” has become especially dangerous since the translation fraternity commandeered it! But for the purposes of this column, we simply mean choosing the keywords a local searcher would have chosen – we do not mean translating them.

To this end, Anders Hjorth of Paris-based BDBL Media presented a fascinating case study at the latest International Search Summit. Anders is a long standing speaker at SMX and is someone I’ve bumped into at numerous conferences around the globe.

He took a project which required the promotion of “Glasses” internationally (in fact, to 5 different countries) and he then compared the outputs of two different teams. Team X was a combination of Google Adwords Editor and Google Translate – in other words, automated translation. Team Y was a group of search marketers each of whom spoke the target language in question natively.

Some Surprising & Some Shocking Findings

You’ll not be surprised to learn that Team X, the results from the automated translation team, were not as good as those from the human Team Y. But nonetheless, there were some rather disturbing findings.

Firstly, Anders expected that the X Team, the automated translation approach, would result in a lower potential daily budget. It didn’t. In fact, it was substantially more than the “human” team.

This required some investigation — the result of which was that the automated approach was including a great many “keywords” which were incorrectly inflating the value or placing them in the wrong categories:

• Incorrect Translation
• Duplicated Keyword Skewing Categorization
• Inappropriate Keywords
• Weird And Wonderful

The Xtreme Consequences Of The X-Team

It’s easy to understand the idea that keywords were added which covered products which were outside the “scope” of the campaign as a result of incorrect translation. This online glasses retailer was not interested in selling “Solar Telescopes” for instance, but the phrase was included in the calculations for the daily budgets.

The carefully categorized seed keywords used for the translation, also no longer matched the categories of the translations — as a result, the X-team mixed up the categories completely which had the effect that keywords in different categories were competing against each other inflating the estimated cost of the campaign.

Further, “Human Eye” can only be described as inappropriate as can “Man Sunglasses”. But for weird and wonderful instances, look no further than “Bezel Child”, “Optician Optician”, “Eye Views” or “Telescope Mounts”.

The Automated Translation X Team Output For The UK Versus The Human Version

You can also see in the above graphic, a considerable difference in the length of the long tail, the development of which really requires human input and knowledge.

This over-inflation of the spends means that if you really went with this approach, you would be setting a larger budget and spending money more rapidly than you should, and you’d be getting much lower conversions. It’s the worst of both worlds.

It’s Worse… There Are Keywords Missing

The situation was actually much worse than just that the estimated spends had been over-inflated. Very important keywords, including examples such as “Spectacles” or “Shades” for the UK, were completely missing — as were many of the staple “Buy” keywords so significant for online retailers.

Ander’s case study was great proof, if proof is still needed, that translating keywords leads to disaster. Spend too high with lower potential conversions AND some key converting keywords not even in the mix.

Just Because It’s Google Doesn’t Make It Right

Google has been offering Google Adwords support within the Google Translator Toolkit to make it easier for advertisers since the end of 2009, but that doesn’t mean you should be using it just because it’s Google.

To be fair, on the Google blogpost they do offer a cautionary note, “Reaching foreign-language customers requires more than campaign localization.To attract international customers your landing pages should also be translated.”

Sorry Google, but this method of translating campaigns does not work the for the campaigns, never mind the landing pages!

The Digital Lotus

Anders also presented a curious marketing model to help understand the prioritization of advertising fields which he calls the “Digital Lotus”. His point is to start with the contents, “If you don’t have contents in the target language, then don’t talk to us,” he said.

The next level is the distribution of information virally, then Adwords and Facebook and then onto remarketing. See below.

The Digital Lotus

Forget The Principles, What’s The Bottom Line?

I’m sure some people think that I’ve spent the last decade ranting on about how you “Must not translate your keywords!” think that I’m a purist or that I’ve completely lost the plot.

Not so. Here we show that if you’re a client, translating keywords will cost you a considerable money or your job. And if you’re an agency, it can certainly cost you the client.

Is it any wonder that the publishers of global websites look for solutions that save time, but most especially cost; and there are many ways of reducing cost:

• You can choose to localize only essential sites and to “leave” the rest in English.
• You can reduce the many “flavors” of language to the core — so there would be only be one version of Spanish.
• You can use automated machine translation — such as Google Translate.

Of these three options, it could be argued that using automated on the fly translation such as Google Translate, would do the least amount of damage to your international SEO and SEM.

The Techniques Which Help To Reduce Duplication

The first point to make is that hitting the duplication filters does not necessarily mean you have incurred a penalty. For many, the only result of having a site-based duplication problem is that the wrong page shows up to the wrong user.

A visitor to German-speaking Austria for example, might see a page from Germany with German stores, suppliers or resellers rather than the right content intended for Austria itself.

Duplication Can Be Good But Too Much Is Bad News

Where duplication becomes a problem is if “Panda”, the so-called machine learning technique which Google is deploying to improve the quality of sites listed in its index, discovers the duplication and reads it as an indicator of a site with poor quality.

This might happen if there is a significant degree of duplication which is adding little value or is not relevant to the users on the receiving end.

1. Use Local Domains

Google engineers have been quoted from various conferences as saying that using ccTLDs or local domains helps with duplication. I can confirm that, having seen local domains and dot-coms deployed across a great many international websites, local domains do indeed go a long way to solving this type of problem, as well as having other benefits.

You notice the impact of this first not in the increased traffic to your site — but to the country sources of that traffic. Instead of some of the countries in which you publish seeing a mixed bag of countries in the country sources of your analytics, you actually notice that the range of countries — as well as the range of search engines (multiple versions of Google) feeding the visitors in, the diversity actually drops. So what’s happening?

What’s happening is that a visitor from, say, Argentina who is searching in Spanish via Google Argentina is no longer seeing website links from Spain appearing in their results, but those from the correct site for Argentina. The geo-targeting effort is beginning to properly target the geo, so to speak.

2. Sacrifice SEO In Insignificant Markets

This is much more controversial – you might want to grab a coffee or whisky before continuing!

Let’s just suppose that, although you are required to publish in Angola, it’s not at the very top of your target list. Angola is a Portuguese-speaking country, but you might actually be more interested in increasing the levels of traffic from Brazil.

What you can do in this situation is ask search engines to no longer crawl your Angolan content using No Index tags or the Robots.txt protocol. What this means is that you still maintain a copy of your website for Angola (using an identical copy of the one for Brazil) but instead of finding that Angolan website in search engines, you find the Brazilian version.

You can also use the “rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x” ” tag along with rel=”canonical” or 301 redirects to achieve a similar effect.

Why bother doing this? You would do this to reduce the impact of duplication and in turn with the aim of achieving better results from Brazil itself.

3. Restrict The Amount Of Content Translated

Instead of focusing on cost, you could start to focus on ROI. What that means in this context is that instead of running websites in English or copies of a language for a particular country, you withdraw it altogether.

Certainly for anyone on the global trail, it makes sense to move country by country and to target those countries with websites where having that website means you will be able to make a return. Don’t launch websites just to get a tick in the box!

4. Rewrite It Or Retranslate It?

Rewriting content is not popular with marketers because that also brings its own cost. Translating content into multiple versions of the same language is often more cost-effective than re-writing and fits in with existing systems.

Using different translators for the same target language, ironically also solves the duplication problem!

5. Use Google Translate

Readers of this column may be surprised to see the “Use Google Translate” heading — but let me explain why it is here. It’s certainly NOT in this list because I think it’s a good idea. It’s here because many don’t understand that Google Translate does things on “on the fly”. The relevant pages cannot be crawled, as they don’t actually exist until the user requests them.

What this means is the Google Translate doesn’t cause duplication problems. There may even be a case for using it in markets you are NOT targeting, to service the rare customers you have there. It’s definitely not the way to target a country to actually drive growth there but by removing duplication can help other markets.

6. Live With It Dude

For the less serious examples of duplication, the solution may actually be to put up with it. This might mean making some simple changes to the information displayed on the page.

For instance, if you know you’re French pages typically rank better in French-speaking Belgium, you may wish to add a clickable flash on the page which says, “Looking For Our Belgian Site?” and lead users to the right destination anyway.

The fact is that the duplication problem is not going to go away, for the simple reason that marketers looking for short cuts to avoid cost are likely to run up against a search engine which sees short cuts as typical of the techniques used by spammers and therefore a legitimate one for them to treat as a form of trash!

Even though Google’s rate of growth outside the US and UK exceeds the US by some 20%, it still seems significantly behind both the Chinese performance of Baidu at 85% growth over the same quarter in 2010 or Yandex’s 65% growth over the same period.

Of course, both Baidu and Yandex are helped by their market leading postions in growing economies. The IMF is forecasting 9.4% growth for China in 2011 and 4.2% for Russia. By comparison, the UK’s growth rate is expected to be 1.1% and the US a rattling 1.5%.

Google Baidu and Yandex Compared Financially

The chart above shows the relative revenues of Google versus Baidu and versus Yandex which gives us a great perspective on what we’re talking about. Although Google growth is less than the other two engines in percentage terms, in real dollars, it’s actually a much much bigger number.

Strong Growth Markets Help Baidu & Yandex

Additionally, looking at percentages is a little misleading when we consider that many of the economies where Google is successful, such as in western Europe, have very high penetrations of Google use and the scope for growth is much more limited.

Both Yandex and Baidu have all their operations in countries where Internet penetration is relatively low giving them great scope for advancement.

Google Baidu and Yandex Compared In Revenues As a Percentage Of The Total

This second graphic above seems to suggest that Google is losing market share internationally. There is a grain of truth in drawing that conclusion – but it is a relatively small “grain”.

Firstly, Yandex only become a publicly quoted company this year giving us much more insight into the statistics relating to its performance and enabling us to include its figures on this chart.

However, what it does suggest is that Google is missing out on two key markets where the search engine market is growing rapidly meaning that both Yandex and Baidu are increasing their share of the global market — at least in dollar terms.

Stellar Performance From Baidu With Room To Grow

Baidu CEO Robin Li described the results as “stellar”. He also highlighted the fact that China’s search industry is still in its early stages and that Baidu has “Enormous room for continuing growth as users and online marketing customers become increasingly sophisticated.”

Mr. Li also pointed to three factors which had helped Baidu along in this quarter namely traffic growth, improved monetization from the Pheonix platform which drives the contextual ads and greater uptake of search advertising by large corporate advertisers.

The use of more sophisticated keyword matching for Pheonix Nest through something called “Advanced [quick] match” has been particularly successful at capturing user intent and generating strong click through rates.

Personalized Search Lands On Baidu’s Homepage

Robin Li has expressed particular satisfaction at the launch of the Baidu personalized homepage, which is not personalized search as we know it — but automated changes to the content shown on the initial homepage before the user even begins to search. This is based on search history, of course, and if a user has a history of searching for movies, for instance, then they will likely see a link on the homepage to local cinema times.

Turning to mobile, ironically, Baidu is now also the default search engine on over 80% of branded handsets in China that use the Android system — which just goes to show that Android dominance hasn’t so far been leading to greater search query shares for Google.

Yandex Says Hello To Turkey

For Yandex, this is only the second quarter where we have detailed financial information but CEO Arkady Volozh highlighted the market benefit, “While our markets are fluid and competitive by nature, they are large and are growing rapidly.” Yandex also made the first major investment in a new market with their launch in Turkey which will have had very little impact on the quarter’s figures.

Where is this revenue coming from?

I’ve been tracking Google’s figures and breaking out the role of the international world since Google started revealing those figures a few years ago.

For the first time in this quarter’s release, Google revealed more information about mobile, saying it represented an annual run rate of $2.5 billion. It’s a little odd that more detail isn’t given about a sector Google believes is critical.

Wow, ‘Even The UK’ Is Performing Better!

The international growth figures are always somewhat masked by the poorer growth rates in the U.S. and especially the U.K. For Google, the U.K. has performed relatively poorly for a couple of years now, largely related to the state of the U.K. economy. This time, CFO Patrick Pichette revealingly said, “Even the U.K. continues to show some positive momentum.” Note that word “even”!

When you analyse the figures, you discover that, ignoring currency hedging, the U.S. grew “only” at an annual rate of 24% compared with 2010. Obviously, that’s still a pretty good performance.

But what is truly outstanding is Google’s international performance which, as you can see in the chart below, reached the heady figure of 44% annual growth — nearly 20% faster than the U.S. As the chart shows, this rate has actually been accelerating over the past three quarters.

Perhaps this helps to explain why, with SMX’s help, we have been promoting the InternationalSearchSummit and stressing the opportunities internationally for U.S. businesses.

Google Q3 Growth Internationally Compared To The U.S. And U.K.

In the call the Google team did with its analysts (you can follow as a webcast here), sales chief Nikesh Arora highlighted a number of countries where strong performance had been seen: Canada, Spain, Japan, Australia, India and Brazil. Australia, India and Brazil are certainly among the world’s better performing economies.

The performance in Japan will have improved significantly as a result of the deal to power Yahoo Japan, which will have lifted Google virtually overnight from seeing less than half of the search queries in Japan to seeing most of them.

Google HeadCount V Revenues

As you can see above, the headcount has continued to grow, maintaining roughly a similar percentage of cost as it did last quarter.

In April, Google announced (FT.com) that it was expecting to see a surge of 80% from its operations in Brazil, with Google’s Brazilian business generating at least $500 million. This is partly why Google has been expanding its workforce significantly in Brazil, with increases of as much as 50% estimated by some for that market.

One aspect of Google’s international performance has been changes in the way its Quality Score works, with tests having been run in markets such as Spain. The chart below shows the growth rates of both cost-per-click and the number of clicks compared with previous quarters.

These figures are difficult to read due to the fact that Google has never given a baseline figure to base them on, but it looks like the average cost of a click has gone down significantly, whilst the volume has gone up.

Google CPC Values Over Time

There has certainly been no change in the continuing investment in marketing as mentioned in this column previously. However, intriguingly, markets such as China and Russia were not mentioned in the call as contributing to performance, which correlates with statements from companies such as Yandex that more than 80% of advertising revenue is theirs.

The Larry Page Effect

However you look at the figures, Google’s performance internationally is breathtaking — it would just be useful and more transparent from Mr. Page to give more information on a market-by-market basis. I’m surprised Google is not under more pressure from shareholders to reveal these figures too!

“Global” is frankly often the front end of a steamroller which crushes all before it in a form of harmonisation or centralization process. “International” on the other hand, at least for me, tends to imply more respect for other cultures and identities and working with them and alongside them.

They both, however, suffer from the same weakness as do their users; they both look at the world at a “country” level which for many international marketers is job done — no need to dig any deeper.

Unfortunately, life isn’t really like that. There are nations which are highly centralized, such as the US, UK or France — and then there are those which are not — in fact, most countries.

The US, UK or France are actually much more diverse than my initial statement implies. (It used to be a joke of mine when clients approached us they’d ask which languages we worked in — and I would say “everything but Welsh” which lasted until someone replied, “That’s a shame, we need a website in English and Welsh”.)

Take A Closer Look At Regions

Some countries are split into language “regions” such as Switzerland where the country is divided into French, German, Italian and Romansh speaking areas.

With the exception of “Romansh,” which fortunately is spoken by only 60,000 people in Switzerland, the three major languages of Switzerland are easy to identify because they are major global languages. Everyone has heard of French, German or Italian. The same is true of Canada and whilst Belgium has “Flemish” most known it is very close indeed to Dutch.

The tricky countries are those with regional languages most marketers have not heard of. Take Spain, for example, Spanish is such an important and global language, that by far, the greatest presumption I come across is that everyone in Spain speaks Spanish.

Spain And Its National Regions

Take a look at the map above. This shows the many regions of Spain but more importantly it shows the several regions where there are strong local “Dialects”. One of my lecturers at University once said to me, “The only difference between a language and a dialect is an army!”

Think about that for a while and you’ll realize that what he meant is there’s no real difference — other than a political one. I can tell you that in search marketing the definition of a “dialect” is usually “Something we’re not getting into!”

Whether “Dialects” Or “Regional Languages” – There Are Opportunities

But you should. Since many global companies ignore so called “dialects”, there is a distinct competitive advantage in addressing them.

For instance, you shouldn’t think of the Catalan language spoken in Catalonia as a “dialect” but as a language opportunity and deal with it as such. The same is true of Basque and Galician which with Catalan are official languages of the regions they relate to.

Catalan is given an “official” status by Google too — since you can use Google’s keyword tool to check keyword search volumes in Spain. Galician and Basque are sadly not available via that route but do exist in Google Translate.

Having recently returned from Barcelona, Catalonia is an important commercial region chosen by companies such as Yahoo and Microsoft for some of their regional resources. The sight of Catalan flags everywhere emphasizes the emotional support given to things Catalan — which means you can win fans there too.

Vols barats -- Cheap Flights In Catalan

As the above shows, Google sees 1,900 searches for “vols barats” each month. That may be small in number — but it’s also less expensive. Each click will cost you, at current estimates, would cost you $6.91 in top position. the Spanish “vuelos baratos” would cost somewhere around $24.19 for the same position (both figures according to Google’s Traffic Estimator).

For Localization, Always Put ROI First

But how? Firstly, you should consider your own ROI, needs and objectives. But useful approaches might include keywords, adtexts and landing pages on a paid search campaign in Catalan.

Another option would be the SEO route as Google.cat — Google search in Catalan — also exists. You’ll find that the folks behind Volsbarats.cat have already figured this one before you and have a nice position lined up for themselves!

Don’t forget there are also opportunities in social media too — you don’t necessarily need to invest in a whole new localization approach just to get in the game! The message is clear, dear global internet marketer, please dig deeper. There are significant opportunities in them there dialects — or rather, regional languages.

If so, you’d better sit down and take a strong drink as the first salvos in the new Search Engine War has just been exchanged — and this time, it’s not going to be so one-sided.

Google’s ‘Blitzkrieg’ from 2003 to 2006 took out many locally strong search engines who simply couldn’t find the resources, couldn’t match Google’s pace of innovation or couldn’t resist Google’s entreaties to become “Powered by Google” — in other words, to cash-up and make ‘peace’.

Google’s Global Conquest Stumbled In The East

But the thrust faltered in the east first with Seznam in the Czech Republic holding on for dear life, an obstacle Google simply circumnavigated; then in Russia, where the European advance came to an abrupt halt at Yandex’s door. (Didn’t Napoleon and Hitler hit a similar snag?)

As for China, Google found itself up against a culture it didn’t really get and a monolithic search engine called Baidu that was based on a similar technology to the Page Rank system (looking at links) that Baidu’s founder Robin Li had filed for patents even before Google managed to file theirs.

The result wasn’t pretty and resulted in a rather disorderly retreat to Hong Kong and the erection of a heavily camouflaged Google China homepage — made to look like one from Hong Kong!

On September 13th, Google finally hit back in China with a new service called Shihui which is designed to aggregate deals from over 100 partner sites. Google’s share of Chinese search had declined to just 19% in the second quarter of this year, according to Analysys International, the Beijing research firm.

Shihui now gives Google the opportunity to claim additional shares of search queries in an area which is over-populated in China — namely, group buying deals since over 2000 deal sites operate in this space in China.

Leading The Advance With Secondary Products

It’s a clever strategy to go up against the competition in an area where they’re not yet so well known, though Baidu point out that they already have an “enormous and highly successful” deals aggregator called Tuan.

However, this is clearly a new area and one where consumers need a solution which offers clarity and greater opportunity for deal making. But then choosing to lead with secondary products in the new advance also seems to be what Yandex and Baidu have concluded.

For instance, Yandex has released Apps.Yandex.ru a new search tool for finding mobile apps, an area of high growth and limited user-friendly tools.

This particular search works across iPhone, iOS and Android platforms and finds Russian language apps via search queries which are directly or indirectly related to the app. It also transliterates Russian language searches such as “монополия” and finds the equivalent English version, in this case: “Monopoly”.

Yandex’s Ambitious Expansion Plans

Yandex’s new search tool is particularly noteworthy because Yandex has launched the mobile solution first, before the desktop has access to such a facility! It is also a service which could readily be expanded to international markets without the core search product being implemented first.

Virtually simutaneously, Preston Carey, the US Business Development Director for Yandex, was speaking at the International Search Summit alongside SMX East in New York. He refused to be drawn on Yandex’s international plans inevitably, but did hint that there was a major announcement in the pipeline.

In previous articles, I have speculated that in addition to working harder to capture markets in “slavic” eastern Europe — an obvious target for a Russian search engine — that Yandex would be launching in locations such as Turkey or the Middle East.

Yandex Strikes In Turkey

Then today Yandex CEO Arkady Volozh announced that it had expanded its operations to the Turkish market by launching a local Web search engine, yandex.com.tr.

This follows the news just last week that Baidu was beginning the launch of services in Egypt and Thailand.

In fact, paralleling Google choosing to use non-pure search weapons to reactivate China and Yandex creating tools that are different for Russia but which can also be easily rolled out internationally, Baidu has chosen to test the waters in Egypt and Thailand with non-core products.

On The Right Wang Mengqiu Baidu VP Search R & D and Consumer Products

I interviewed Wang Mengqiu, VP in charge of search R&D and consumer products when I visited Baidu in June.

She was quite open that Baidu was preparing for international expansion.

In fact, she explained that this is one reason why Baidu will probably increase its use of machine learning techniques in the future because, “We need to understand different languages to develop our international strategy.

“But we are Chinese and we know better in Chinese but machine learning helps us to analyse user search patterns and behaviors even in other languages.”

Ms. Wang also added at that time that, “Web search might not be our first product in other countries.  We may launch “Baidu Knows” first which is very successful for us in China.”

Baidu Knows is a ​Q & A answer system and is precisely what has been soft launched in Arabic for Egypt as well as in Thai for Thailand where the Baidu web directory Hao123 has also been launched.

Seeking High Economic & Internet Growth

In fact, the intriguing thing about the international aspirations of both Yandex and Baidu is that they are likely headed in the same direction. Both are looking for high growth — high Internet penetration markets where Google is number one simply because they’ve never had any serious competition.

For the last few years, Google has been able to focus its development efforts in other markets where there is more competition, and now, that seems to be changing.

It is key for the smaller regional search engines such as Yandex, Naver and Baidu, that they take the competitive effort to Google in a wider range of markets otherwise it becomes too easy for Google to marshall its army of resources and point them at their domestic markets.

It is also helped by factors such as the fact that Yandex have built up their war chest with a $1.3 billion IPO, so they have cash and are ready to go.

The New Search Engine Warzone Source: WebCertain

Baidu, meanwhile, has been benefitting from its earlier IPO but also the relatively strong and long lasting economic strength of its home nation, enabling it to generate impressively strong profit performance there.

Bing–Yahoo Asia Vacuum Represents Gift For Google

Meanwhile, the increasingly disastrous Yahoo situation has only helped Google in Asia with Yahoo Japan now powered by the Californian behemoth rather than Yahoo or Bing.

Bing has concluded a deal with Baidu to provide English language search for users in China, an arrangement which removes a huge headache for Baidu and enables them to focus on more international expansion.

So it’s not surprising that Robin Li reassured top Chinese officials this month, after they had publicly attacked Baidu, saying that he wanted Baidu to become a “Universally recognized brand in over half the world’s countries.”

Which half, Mr. Li?