The latter has announced support for the Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) and a series of further enhancements are expected. IDNA enables webmasters to use domain names which exist outside the original 26 characters used for the English-language - but not for too many other languages since many have odd accented characters. Additionally, this brings greater support for asiatic and arabic character sets.

The other new development which is currently being looked at, according to a senior Google source, is the addition of a tool within webmaster tools whereby you can specify the country your site relates to. The countries will be listed in a drop down list - and you’ll almost certainly only be able to choose once country per site.

For a long time it has been a problem if you site was a .com site with no history of activity in a country for Google to pick out the right ‘bucket’ in which to list your site. For some this was an embarrasment - for others a major business hurdle. Matters were worse for those .coms hosted in a country other than the one they were targeting - perhaps for business political or content management system reasons. The result was you might be targeting France with a site hosted in Norway - but not end up appearing in the ‘Pages Francophones’ of Google.fr - even if the language of the site was French.

The simplest way of solving this problem has always been to have local country domains in which case - contrary to what one SES panelist advised in San Jose, the hosting location becomes irrelevant. For many, this isn’t practical - hence the reason why some have chosen to host locally to get around the problem.

These two developments combined will help international SEO specialists manage their projects with less frustration!

The Pew Global Attitudes Project has released a report illustrating the rapid growth of internet use globally. Much of this growth can be put down to more women and over 50’s coming online across Western Europe.

The report also contains some interesting figures on internet growth across a range of countries, including Russia, China and India, comparing data from 2004 and 2005.

Usage has risen across the board with 35% (rise of 16%) for Russia and for India 21%(rise of 15%).

The Netherlands has the most mature market, with 84% of its inhabitants going online. They are followed by Canada (79%), UK (76%), US (76%)and Germany (67%).

In terms of access Netherlands again came out on top (72%) with established western markets close behind. Access has risen though for Poland (20%, up 18%), China (33%, up 14%), Russia (15%, up 8%) and India (14%, up 11%).

Russian users are still overwhelmingly young people. Only 3% of Russians aged from 50 to 65 have access to the Internet. To compare, in the USA and Canada 68% from this age group use the Internet, in the UK this index is equal to 67%, in Germany – 53%, in France – 52% and in Poland – 22%.

Source: RataNews | Pew Global Attitudes Project

The IABC also says that Canadian French online revenue in 2004 was 65.5 million CAD or 18% of the actual. A rough assumption then would be that French search in Canada is at around 27.9 million CAD and English speaking search around 127 million CAD.

Via: Canadian Online Ad Revenues Surpass Estimates