German authors have mounted a protest against Google’s mass digitization of the world’s books for their http://print.google.com project.

Members of the German main association of authors are in uproar claiming books are being digitized by Google without their authorization. [...]]]> German authors have mounted a protest against Google’s mass digitization of the world’s books for their http://print.google.com project.

Members of the German main association of authors are in uproar claiming books are being digitized by Google without their authorization. Google claims the digitization of books will in fact encourage sales. Not so, says Wilfried F. Schoeller, general secretary of PEN Germany “…it would dispossess the authors of their work.”

It is not just German authors that are angry with Googles plans to digitize the world’s books. Authors from the UK and US, as well as other countries, are united in protest claiming that Google is using text snippets without authors’ permission.

Google has already begun scanning the university libraries of Harvard, Stanford, Michigan and Oxford, and the New York Public Library and is also receiving new books to scan from publishers, mainly smaller ones. Google provides links for each book to its publisher and to online bookstores so that the web user can buy it. Google says it will finance the project entirely by selling spot advertising placed next to the search results.

In August, after protests from some U.S. publishers and libraries, Google called a moratorium till November in the scanning of library books which are still subject to copyright restrictions.

Source: DPA / Expatica

I’ll be surprised if this doesn’t land in a court somewhere one day. I’m sure Google have done their legal research however.

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I manage to get back to my homeland (England) occasionally on business and now and then get across the pond to the USA for conferences etc. Each time I go there, I normally catch on the Hotel television an advertisement [...]]]> I manage to get back to my homeland (England) occasionally on business and now and then get across the pond to the USA for conferences etc. Each time I go there, I normally catch on the Hotel television an advertisement for MSN Search or billboard or see in newspapers advertisements for the now not so new MSN Search.

Yet in Germany MSN is really languishing behind Google (+80% search market share) with it has to be said, quite a pitiful share in the search market, you’d think they’d be making more of an effort to be making in roads. I expected a lot of more advertisement on German TV / Radio and in the Press, but it hasn’t come, in fact I believe its only SEOs and a few Webmasters that even know that MSN Search have brought out there own search engine technology. Maybe Microsoft’s millions will hit German advertisers soon. I do know however that they are failing completely in my opinion to market MSN Search effectively in Germany.

This by the way, is why a sponsored listing campaign focusing on the German market should bear in mind that Google is by far the most used search engine and perhaps a PPC campaign should consider its PPC budget accordingly.

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According to a recent study by ARD/ZDF Online, there are now 57.9% of Germans aged from 14 that are online (37.5 Million people). More pensioners and those unemployed have come online as broadband costs sink. The prognosis is for the [...]]]> According to a recent study by ARD/ZDF Online, there are now 57.9% of Germans aged from 14 that are online (37.5 Million people). More pensioners and those unemployed have come online as broadband costs sink. The prognosis is for the upward trend to continue as more and more pensioners and unemployed find online access affordable.

The average time spent online has risen from 43 minutes to 46 minutes per day.

By the year 2010 it is reckoned that 70% of the population over 14 years old will be online. This is significant and online businesses might want to start thinking about products and services that target the elderly.

I seriously believe that in Germany there is a gap in the market for online presences that cater for the elderly. Germany is quite behind in some online sectors and this is one of them.

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Google on their web site say there is almost nothing you can do to harm a website through the building of links from external sites. I unfortunately came across the reason they say almost recently.

To a major extent they [...]]]> Google on their web site say there is almost nothing you can do to harm a website through the building of links from external sites. I unfortunately came across the reason they say almost recently.

To a major extent they are right, even links from bad neighborhoods won’t harm you. The logic of course is that if this was the case it would be open season on all your competitors site.
However, with enough links from local language sites you can blow a site of the water!

We found this out accidentally. The background is as follows.
Google chooses the language of the site through 4 main factors. The physical location of the webserver (IP number), the top level domain name – ‘ .de’ for instance, the meta language tag(s), where the incoming links come from and also the actual language of the text.

Normally you’d think one of these factors could not override the rest. However, inbound links can override all other factors into duping Google that the page is of a different language than it actually is. This has disastrous consequences, for example if a German page focusing on German language readers gets a highly disproportionate amount of links from english language sites. Google ignores the fact the server is in Germany, the top level domain is ‘.de’, the meta language tag is “de” and considers the site english – which results in dropping a lot in google.de but rising in Google.com.

You know this is a problem when you see on a Google.de search the words “Diese Seite Übersetzen” which translated means “translate this page”. This normally corresponds with a fall in Google.de but a big rise in Google.com as Google does boost local sites of the language. I know this is a problem as it has happened to ourselves. http://www.abakus-internet-marketing.de/foren/ is a German language forum but was classed as english as I built too many links to it from non-english sites to it (easier for me as I am english). We quickly changed that and now things are back to normal. For a few days, a lot of traffic was lost. It also happened to a client before we knew about the existence of the problem.

The examples above were due to too many links from english sites, however, an English site with a too large ratio of say German links is likely to end up drastically losing rankings and having “translate this page” in the Google results.

If you come across an english language page with “translate this page” in the google reults and it fails to rank well then it will most likely mean you have too many links from foreign websites. This can happen through link purchase or through one of the many link networks for example.

Fortunately we have managed to get our rankings for our own forum and clients back. It took a while to figure the problem out though so I thought I’d share it here. Clearly this can also be abused by knocking the competition ou,t so imo Google should really not just take inbound links as an overiding factor of language.

Alan
ABAKUS Internet Marketing

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