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!

Since Google’s Caffeine update to its server infrastructure back in June 2010, Google has stepped up the importance of page load speed to its core algorithm. But page load speed has always been important to Google in providing a good searcher experience for Google searches.

And this is a logical stance if you take a second to think it through.

After all, if you consistently found that despite throwing up relevant results your searches continually returned sites which took ages to load, you’d seriously consider using a different search engine too, right?

So what causes slow page load times?

Well, the top five most common causes (in no particular order) which are cited in most large-scale studies of page response times, and which are tackled by all of the tools out on the market today are:

• Poor Caching Controls
• High Request Overheads
• Large Payload Sizes
• Long Round-Trip Times
• No Device Optimisation

The details around each type of issue are well documented elsewhere, for example in Google’s Web Performance Best Practice or Yahoo! Developer’s performance notes, so I won’t run over them again here.

All we need to know is that the number one – and most common – impact to page load times is poor caching controls. However, for multinational sites the very specific caching issue we should look to solve is ‘Proxy Caching’.

Proxy Caching is the practice of storing static resources on public web proxy servers. This is the type of advantage we can leverage in multilingual campaigns targeting multiple territories using a well distributed CDN.

So what should we be looking at to evaluate the quality of a CDN?

1. Well Distributed Edge Nodes

The most important criteria. The location of the CDN’s Edge Nodes should be close to the searcher’s location, this means that having all their servers in just Europe or the US would disadvantage searchers from Asia, for example.

Track down the CDN’s network map and match it against the locations you’re targeting in your search marketing startegy: are all the key countries covered?

If not, you’ll likely still see multiple hops are required for page requests and much of the speed optimisation is lost.

Try testing a CDN’s claims by performing a Ping & Traceroute from an IP within one of your target markets. Use a free multi-territory ping service such as that offered by dotcom-monitor.

2. Configurable Static Caching Of Dynamic Content

You may have noticed that Proxy Caching is concerned with static content.

If your site is built dynamically (and if it’s targeting multiple countries and languages, then it almost certainly is), then regardless of how well your static assets are cached, if big chunks of your body HTML requires dynamic loading then speed gains are for naught.

So make sure your CDN allows you to configure only those essential dynamic areas that should be served directly from your own servers, and dump all the rest of the content to their caching controls.

In 99% of cases, ‘essential’ dynamic areas are often not all that essential, so take time to determine precisely what functionality you need to retain control of on your own servers, and allocate your own resources to focus on its delivery.

For example, updates on your homepage about latest news do not count as ‘essential’ dynamic content.

Depending on your flavour of code, you will likely find a function that allows you to specify CDN information for static files or cache content generated dynamically such as Django’s STATICFILES_STORAGE, which also gives you an easy way to switch providers should you discover the CDN isn’t delivering on its response time promises.

3. Implementation Convenience & Performance Analytics

Many of the more recent CDNs offer superb ease of use when configuring, and speaking as a battle hardened agency-side technical support, that goes a long way in making it into favour with your client’s technical team’s shortlist.

For all the technical sophistication possible with CDNs, the ability to largely hand over the configuration to a few simple WYSIWYG steps in a provider interface has a lot going for it in terms of implementation overhead.

It also prevents errors creeping in to the delivery path, most of which can be critical issues for an SEO’s strategy: a huge benefit.

With such providers, implementation is usually just a case of altering the relevant DNS records to point to their network, which is a 5 minute job.

Making sure the CDN implementation is performing therefore becomes the main criteria for judging if your provider is delivering for you. Look for transparent reporting on traffic location, any user-agent or ‘known threat’ filtering, IP blocking, caching performance, and page load time overview by location.

Ideally, look for integration with your existing Analytics package as this allows you to combine into your standard reporting speed and performance metrics which are business critical to an SEO’s job these days.

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!

In the process, I received numerous questions about keyword research for entering new markets, expanding existing campaigns and using search for market research. The following are the most common questions I received that will hopefully help you get the new year off to a prosperous start.

Launching A New Search Market

If this new market uses a similar language you can often share any existing research with them. Be very careful and ensure that you are only sharing this as a guide and not a mandate to use these words.

Some markets will welcome these lists since they often do not have the time to do extensive research themselves. In other cases, they may view this as corporate meddling or an attempt to drive the message.

There are many great articles on the keyword harvesting process within Search Engine Land’s Keywords and Content section that can get you and your local team started.

It is critical in new markets that you brainstorm with your local market team, sales reps, vendors or anyone speaking the local language to start the list.

A huge problem in new markets is that your product may not exist so translators may not know what to call your product.

In some languages like Japanese the product category or product name can be expressed in a phonetic version of the language.

If the product has never existed there may not be and keyword opportunity to compare so you may need to try to associate it with something they have in the market to allow you to be in the consideration set of alternatives.

Global, Regional Or Local Words

This is a major challenge to multinational companies. It is easy in a market like Japan or Thailand where that is the only place that speaks the language since the content you have is your keywords universe.

If you decide to expand into Australia or Singapore it is often easy to take the US or typically the UK list of words and use them. Trying to target a specific market with a regional site is a big challenge.

Let me say this clearly, there is no country or language called APAC, LatAm or ME. Unfortunately, companies in their haste to launch in new regions often create a regional site to represent their products in the region. These are often launched in English for APAC, Spanish in LatAm and Arabic in the Middle East.

Beyond the obvious local filter challenges with Google there are cultural and linguistic problems, which has been well documented in other articles. Where you can avoid regional or global sites you are better off if you can and have local market sites adopted specifically for them.

Too many times, companies have a “global site” which represents all countries that do not have a country site and then a local country site that is fully customized for the country. If you are taking a single global or regions site approach you need to determine what is most common regional language.

One option is shown below where the company took the most common variation of terms across German speaking markets and launched with those common variations and slowly started expanding the local variations into the unique sites. This allowed them to launch reaching a more focused yet wider market.

Brand Awareness, Leads Or Sales

What is your business objective in the market? Alignment of keywords to the phases of your purchase cycle can help you be successful. In my research, less than 10% of companies have done any buy cycle alignment of keywords and only two companies had done it outside the US.

Understanding the intent of the searches and the phase of the buy cycle – are they just researching, comparing prices or looking for availability especially in new markets can help you select the best words and achieve your goals faster.

Typically, during this “test” phase of a new market focusing on converting words will show success faster and allow you to validate your business case. Once you get additional funding you can start expanding out into the other categories of words.

I am not discouraging the use of head and category keywords since these can help you generate brand awareness. I had a case with a large PC maker that primarily bought their brand keywords in PPC since it allowed them to achieve overly restrictive ROAS goals.

In two new emerging markets this strategy failed as the words generated few impressions and even fewer clicks on their ads.  They then adjusted the campaign to include category words like laptops and desktops and they not only had high click rates but fairly high conversion rates that they did not experience in other markets.

What we later realized was they had little to no brand recognition in the markets and as people were exposed to the products via these category word searches they liked the products and actually converted.

As traditional advertising was added to the market and brand awareness improved their brand-centric terms started converting at a much higher rate.  So we need to understand what our goals are as well as the market’s and management’s ability to cooperate with that goal.

Market Opportunity Review

A tactic that trended highly in my survey was the use of Search Marketing to do market research and test the waters in a new country. One of the features desired of a keyword management tool was the ability to understand opportunity and keyword variations in emerging markets.

For example, at Global Strategies we did market research for a large electronics company and found significant opportunity in Thailand for blenders and bottom freezers in Uzbekistan that did not show up on any “traditional” research or even reports from local sales reps.

Online, we used the local variation of category words like refrigerators and other household appliances to understand keywords variations. In these cases, the demand and specific attributes jumped off the page. This resulted in the company doing test marketing in these areas and being quite surprised with the results leading to both market and product expansion.

A key thing to remember when using search data for market research is to think like the consumer. Starting with category words allows you to see the variations that will naturally appear in the local market.

It is natural for you to think narrowly about your product or service because you are an expert on it. If you are like most companies, your list of candidate keywords contains all the words that you and your team would use to search, but it is probably missing a bunch of keywords your customers actually use especially if they don’t know your products exist.

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!

Google's new HTML markup allows for internationalisation with little unique content.

Previously, Google’s Matt Cutts had stated that blocks of poorly (or auto-) translated content would be considered duplicate.

Obviously, for verticals which require large numbers of pages in any language (say hello eCommerce!), then this change removes a major stumbling block to localising your content without incurring Google’s wrath and losing the ability to perform in key markets.

I’ve covered auditing your site for duplicate content in a previous column, so I won’t go over old ground in determining if multilingual duplication is an issue for you already or not.

Instead, let’s look at how we would set up to take advantage of Google’s new markup support to deliver SEO performance in multiple markets without triggering duplication filters.

There are two aspects to the updated support:

1. Multiple pages which are largely identical (so, not translations) but are intended for different countries.
2. Translated content intended for a particular country.

Lets look at a scenario that applies to both criteria.

Assuming we have the following pages with identical (English) content:

• uk.example.com/english-landing-page
• us.example.com/english-landing-page
• ca.example.com/english-landing-page

In the first aspect of the change, Google states they now support disambiguating language variations as a reason for implementing the link rel=”canonical” HTML code.

In practice, this means that a page pointing to another page via a Canonical tag will now be returned if it is understood as being a page specifically intended to be served to a particular country.

So, Google is stating that rather than roll up non-canonical pages to pass their SEO value to the canonical version, they will instead consider all the pages to have the same value, and only use the canonical version when not returning results in the countries specified by our rel=”canonical” links.

It’s a seemingly minor tweak, but the implication is huge for multinational websites. As it now means as long as we can ensure Google is clear which pages are intended for which countries, we don’t run any risk of falling foul of duplication filters and can comfortably predict that pages differing only in minor details (such as, for example, different currencies for products) will be returned when appropriate.

So, in our example, we would simply implement canonical tags according to Google’s specification on all pages pointing back to our page, we’d like to be used in all other countries (I call this the ‘Global Fallback’).

In this example, we’ll call that the US page. That means all pages would have the following in their <head>:

• <link rel=”canonical” href=”us.example.com/english-landing-page”/>

Lets take a look at the second scenario, and what we’d do in our example to disambiguate intended countries and languages.

In the Google post, it’s stated that should we use a regional subtag when linking to a translated page, then Google will assume that the content is intended for that region – which would be the equivalent of registering a subdomain or top level directory in Google Webmaster Tools to a region separately from the rest of the site content.

This also implies, of course, that any untranslated content that nevertheless is intended for different countries can also make use of this tweak.

So, in our example, in addition to the canonical tag, we’d use the following code in the <head> of each URL to disambiguate our languages and intended countries:

• <link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en” href=”us.example.com/english-landing-page” />
• <link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en-GB” href=”uk.example.com/english-landing-page” />

• <link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en-CA” href=”ca.example.com/english-landing-page” />

And that’s it!

We’ve now got the ability to roll out local country features to improve landing page conversions from SEO and PPC in as many countries as we like without incurring any duplication filters from the Big G.

Given we should be able to improve conversion by at least 0.5%-1% by localising, that’s a clear, valuable win for any website and an easy – if fiddly – technical change to implement.

Year-end Recap

It is critical that you develop a year-end recap and send it out to as many people as possible.

This will let then know your successes as well as challenges in the past year. You can use this to brag about the successes, which can lead to more support as well as budget.

In addition, by outlining the challenges you may be able to motivate others to help and or make appropriate changes within their teams that will help you prevent these problems.

Annual Traffic & Sales Review

Reviewing your inbound traffic and conversions across the year to look for trends or new phrases is a great opportunity to identify new markets, keywords or countries that may have been overlooked in the monthly reviews.

When you look at the trends over an entire year you can often find months that are higher or lower than normal and can adjust your annual or quarterly plans to maximize these spikes.

Keyword Glossaries

Often overlooked are company’s localization glossaries. These are master lists of word pairs that are used in machine translation and translation management tools.

Throughout the year,you may have done a lot of keyword research and modeling that may need to be added to the glossary as well as words replaced with those which have more demand or better match searcher’s intent.

If any new products were added this year, they should be added to the glossary as well to make sure that the most relevant versions are integrated.

Site-Wide Diagnostics

Due the holidays at the end of the year, your workload may decrease giving time to review and clean up many of the common errors that accumulate in Google and Bing Webmaster tools.

New Year/New Tactics Lunch & Learn

Schedule a variety of lunch and learns with your various teams to update them on any new techniques and updates like avoiding Panda penalties. It is often good to update any new employees that were added in the past few moths on the best practices they may not be aware of.

End Of Life Products

Especially if you managing search for a large company you should meet with the product teams to identify products that are no longer sold. It is common in larger companies and especially in consumer electronics that as product reach their “end of life” for marketing they are removed from the site.

While they are no longer sold, they are still being used by consumers that will need replacement parts, services and hopefully upgrades. You can create a hybrid page that represents these options for consumers and replace the previous product page to allow you to continue to capture those still interested in your products.

Any of these can help find nuggets of opportunities that will help you look good in the first quarter. It will also help you to make budget justifications and support additional headcount or agency budgets for specific roles.

Most importantly, you should have a good idea of the overall progress and what opportunities you have for improvement in the new year.

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!

Google Places, to be exact.

By dominating the SERP real estate for related search terms, taking around 65% or more of all search traffic (depending on the flavour of Places functionality) for top level terms, Google Places performance is critical for travel accommodation businesses across the globe.

A search in the UK for 'Hotels Singapore' in Google, note the SERP real estate used by Google Places listings.

Optimising Bulk Feeds For Google Places

If you’re a hotel chain operating in a single country (that’s covered by Places functionality), then your first port of call should be to walk through Google’s comprehensive guides to getting your data verified and live.

But what about optimising your listing to become one of the listed properties in the 6 or 9 slots triggered via Google Universal for relevant searches?

Looking at the multinational aspect, what if that search is made outside of the hotel country, in a different language? How do you make sure that when a business traveler in the UK searches for ‘hotel singapore’, your hotel pops up in the hallowed map slots above the fold?

The key is twofold: get your foundations as detailed as possible, and layer up with reviews.

The Foundations Of Places Optimisation

When Google Base launched back in 2005, it provided a way to bulk upload information to Google Local (now Google Places). While this was greatly needed, the process was fiddly, and often failed to validate for imperceptible reasons.

That said, ensuring you included information for all available fields meant you would find yourself almost immediately ranked in the top positions for Google Universal results which pulled in Google Local listings.

For my money, in 2005 it was just about the most cost effective use of an SEOs time bar none for clients in the Travel vertical.

The only real additional optimisation available back then was to constantly refresh your feed content, each resubmission bumping your results back up to the top of the 9-pack for highly trafficed terms.

The days of mindlessly resubmitting slightly tweaked content are over however, since, as we will see, we have a more sophisticated way to take advantage of the ‘freshness factor’ these days while also leveraging the power of reviews.

In the meantime, our hotel chain should be getting all the required places information in place, then digging through the extensive custom attributes suggested by Google. Remember: today’s suggested custom attribute is tomorrow’s required attribute for a vertical.

In particular, for hotels the following custom options should be considered essential:

• Aaa_Rating
• Accommodation_Type
• Rate
• General_Ameneties
• In_Room_Ameneties
• Discounts
• Guest_Services
• Nearby_Attractions
• Awards
• Dining_Entertainment
• Meeting_Capacity
• Michelin_Rating

Also, if the hotel also has a restaurant, the custom attributes for that should be included.

Finally, including image content, and – in particular – video content will not only benefit your Google Places listing, but will trigger better performance in Image & Video search results too: both of which are growth search markets (did you know that 10% of all searches in Google go though Google Image search? That’s more traffic than most other search engines’ total searches.).

Building Places Performance Multinationally

For our foundations, it’s simply a case of localising and uploading a version of our bulk file in each language using the correct language selection. Google even hosts a sample file using multiple languages you can crib from (don’t forget to add in all those juicy extra custom categories though!).

More challenging is building the review support for the feed and tying it in with our listing. While Google promotes the ability for users to rate businesses via Google Maps, they also pull in reviews from highly trafficed review sites – particularly for accommodation – from the likes of Trip Advisor, Booking.com, Hotels.com, Expedia and so on.

But reviews are also pulled in from correctly microformatted data found on other websites – including, with some vetting, the hotel (or hotel chain’s) own website.

So we have two types of review content we can influence: content we host, and content hosted on external review sites.

Given we have the ability to respond to reviews on most of the big player review websites, most chains will already be engaging with the Trip Advisor et al already as part of their social media strategy (and if not, why on earth not! Get cracking!).

They are also, hopefully, responding positively and making sure that they take action to prevent the cause of poor reviews (improving service levels, adding room amenities, etc), which has the benefit of delivering better average review ratings.

This is particularly useful for our second strand of Google Places optimisation.

We need to ensure two things:

• Lots of review content
• Generally positive reviews

If I was forced on pain of death to assign a percentage of importance on those two metrics, I’d go for 70% on the quantity of reviews. So even if you’re getting poor reviews, you should be stepping up to the plate to get more reviews up (and, of course, also working hard to improve your customer experience where it’s being shown up as inadequate in reviews).

Given we are able to improve the quality of our reviews by hard work on the business side, how do we increase the number of reviews?

Simple: by raising the profile of the review site brands in your hotels, and by running display advertising campaigns on their sites to raise the awareness of your brand to their audience (as their audience is de facto more likely to leave a review after staying in one of your hotels).

So, the underlying strategy is the same for each country operated in by multinational brands, but it’s important to know that each territory will have different triggers for a positive holiday accommodation experience, so catering to that, and promoting those aspects through your display channels will drive up the quantity and value of your rating content in each territory.

Increased review activity will refresh the Google Places listing, ensuring it stays in the top positions for Google Universal results triggered for high value search terms globally.

Congratulations: you’ve not only optimised for a high value traffic stream, you’ve also got your business focussed on improving its core service; that’s a win win in any book.

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.