Global Search Engine Marketing & Social Media News And Analysis » Germany

Google’s Multilingual SEO Tips From SMX Munich

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 09:36:47 +0000

Yesterday’s standing room only international SEO session at SMX Munich featured Johannes Müller of Google Zurich and one of Google’s most popular spokespeople, known in the forums as “johnmu.” In English, he typically goes under the name “John” so I’ll continue for this piece with that anglicised version of his name.

John is a specialist on Google’s webmaster tools and has a lot to say on geo-targeting for international websites. He’s due to speak on Thursday this week at the International Search Summit Munich which takes place in the Hilton Munich Park Hotel immediately after the main show. John will also be speaking there on the management of multilingual websites — no doubt another packed session, though this time in English.

The Trouble With Geo-Targeting

The trouble with geo-targeting is that, whilst it’s relatively simple in practice, it does appear confusing at first sight. John understands this too and begins his presentation with a very simple structure to represent the building blocks of international and multilingual website management. He initially subdivides the subject into international, multilingual websites and those using hreflang though this structure soon falls apart as the audience throw in question upon question.

The first key point is that local websites in a region — such as German-speaking Switzerland — are presented higher in the rankings by Google where that helps to deliver greater relevance to the user. John says “Internationalisation is not difficult — but you do have to focus”.

Google tries algorithmically to decide based on geographic factors which will be the most relevant result. He gives the example of a search for “Bahn”. Meaning “railway”, you would expect information on Swiss railways if you searched for “Bahn” in Switzerland and on German rail if you searched in “Germany”. Google looks at things such as the IP address of the searcher and which of Google’s domains the search is carried out on to help in presenting the right results. So Google.de will tend to provide results which are “Germany” related unless there are other factors about the search that necessitate the information being pulled from outside the country.

“Don’t Worry About Duplicate Content”

John says that you shouldn’t worry about duplicate content as that is not penalised and Google has a very rational policy to dealing with it. He explains that Google understands that on mysite.fr you may have the same textual content that you have on my site.ca/fr and works to present the right result. He adds to a questioner in the room who doesn’t seem to be setting the right result that it is important to look at how well Google is able to crawl the site.

He goes on to stress the importance of having a unique URL per set of contents, whether thats targeted by country or language and stresses the importance of keeping a “clean” separation between countries. As he’s speaking German, he uses the word “sauber” for clean, a word which is uttered at least 20 times during the session with an implication that most of the problems international sites currently have are caused by their owners messing things up. International and global SEOs, you need to clean up your act!

We have presented the different factors which Google uses to determine the geography which should be associated with particular websites for many years. But Google recently introduced the Hreflang tag, which Susan Moskwa presented to the International Search Summit in San Jose.

How Geo-Targeting Became Muddled

The situation then became a little muddled in a main session at SMX San Jose when the importance of canonical tags and hreflang tags was discussed.

The whole situation has left many global SEOs at least puzzled. I have been receiving messages from large website owners saying that they can’t see how it works, how they should deploy and, worse, that when they deploy the recommendations, it has no effect whatsoever. Yet we mustn’t forget that Google is introducing this for a reason, even if the reason is somewhat opaque.

John moves the subject along by providing a list I’ve never seen before from any of the Google speakers on the subject and which helps to set the recent changes in a more understandable context.

Google’s Geo-targeting Factors Ranked By Importance

He lists the factors which Google uses to determine the correct geo-targeting of sites and pages as:-

ccTLD
webmaster tools
server location
Rel-alternate hreflang
Other signals

This is a very useful list because it does a number of significant things. Firstly, it re-affirms the fact that ccTLDs continue to have the greatest level of important appearing at the top of the list and meaning that these continue to take precedence over the newer Hreflang tag option.

Webmaster tools is also shown in second place to ccTLDs — exactly where it should be in my opinion, but many newbies to international SEO continue to think of that as the first and most ideal option for Google. However, Hreflang tags have taken a slot above “Other signals”, which is now where “language” must reside.

Keep It Clean Guys

The usual question crops up of whether you can use subdomains or folders and John takes the opportunity to reiterate that it doesn’t really make much difference between the tool, “As long as you’re maintaining a “sauber” separation between countries and languages.

A questioner asks about the fact that the using the geo-settings in Webmaster Central, Google’s webmaster console, John explains something which many web masters had figured, namely that it typically takes around a month for Webmaster Central’s geo-settings to take full effect.

He is then asked if the regional location of a server within a country has any bearing on geo-targeting or location placement and confirms that this has no bearing whatsoever.

Whoops A Little Disagreement

Then a slide appears what says that “Language is not geo-targeting”, giving the example of French being a language which people could possibly wish to view in many parts of the world, not just in France.

I disagree with John on this one — and the example is misleading. It is possible to geo-target the speakers of single country languages such as Polish or Korean and for many this would be the least cost route to reach their audience, as well as potentially capturing emigrants from that country in other locations. Of course for the world languages such as French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic and so on, then the point is true.

He continues by explaining that It is not possible to target regionally, for example there is no setting or method for targeting “Asia”.

Who’s At Fault For Landing On The Wrong Pages?

On Thursday, I will say to John that he did make me chuckle with his next point. Instead of automatically re-directing users who are “Landing on the wrong pages”, he suggests using a banner which says “Did you mean to visit Switzerland?” The reason it made me chuckle is because, by implication, it means that the users of Google or the publishers of sites in Google, are actually the ones who’re at fault for causing landings on incorrect pages. Google’s algorithm is not at fault! Nice one!

It is important to have just one language per page — and particular attention has to paid to templates that are not translated whilst the content is as this is a situation which presents Google with particularly tough challenges. Pages with small samples of keywords in another language can cause problems — such as a German site promoting Spanish properties — because Google tries to establish the main language on a page.

He didn’t explain, but the background to this is that the first thing Google has to do when it indexes a page of content is to decide what is the principal language of the page as the remaining indexing processes are highly language dependent. Getting the language wrong at the first pass will mean that things do not go well down the line.

When Google Definitely Does Ignore Meta Tags

Language meta tags and language code references or variables, Google ignores. They are not a good signal because so much content is copy pasted without these settings being adjusted.

Automatic translation causes significant problems for search engine-related content. I also had to smile when John included “Google Translate” in his description as one of the culprits — with the intention I guess of giving a balanced and fair message.

Text in pictures and flash is difficult to recognise, which is something SEOs have known about for years, but localised websites in multiple languages often forget the images and banners with the result that content appears incorrectly on the page. Google still does not do much with this kind of content — which means that for certain difficulties it provides an opportunity to present content which it would be inappropriate for Google to index. An example would be a message that said “Are you looking for Switzerland or Germany?”

Unicode Helps to Avoid Gobbledygook

Cross linking to different language versions is desirable, as this helps Google’s algorithms to see the complete network as such and give it its proper values. John also warned that Google doesn’t accept “accept-language” requests.

Unicode or UTF8 avoids characters which are specific to a particular language looking like gobbledygook and difficult for Google to recognise — noting that Google has algorithms to recongise differences such as “ü” or “ue”. For non-German speakers, the “ü” can be correctly replaced with the “ue” — some years ago Google did not recognise these two versions as identical producing different sets of results.

John stressed the point that the Hreflang tag is a page level signal — not site level. It also has nothing to do with ranking but means that the pages are “swapped” in the results to show the right content at the right time to the right user.

John Müller will be speaking at the InternationalSearchSummit.com on Thursday of this week.

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Datenschutz: Study Shows That Germans Do Not Feel At All Safe Online

Kristjan Mar Hauksson — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 15:31:50 +0000

According to a study done by BITKOM on the German online market around 55% of German Internet users don’t think that their data is safe and 16% feel that their data is not safe so do not use the Internet to buy items online and 28% do not practice banking online.

What is surprising is the how this splits between age groups at it seems that older users trust the Internet more than the young. 47% of those that took part in the research said that they were unsure of how they could protect their personal data and 72% want the state to regulate what happens online, specifically privacy.

The biggest surprise is the number of people asked that 39% of those asked said that they would prefer to send sensitive documents through traditional mail instead of communicating online, through email or other channels.

You can read more about this report online

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European Interactive Advertising Association Report Dec. 2010

Sante J. Achille — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 11:47:35 +0000

The European Interactive Advertising Association has published the EIAA European Media Landscape Report Summary, December 2010.

The key findings of the report include:

521m 16+ year old people in the 15 European countries sampled
According to EIAA’s latest Mediascope Europe study 76% (396m) of all 16+ year old people across 15 European markets surveyed use different media simultaneously with almost a third (30%) using the internet whilst they watch TV
A third (33%) of Europeans cannot live without the internet, equal to the percentage of Europeans who claim they cannot live without TV
54% (279m) of Europeans use the internet in a typical week spending 12.1 hours online
16‐24 year olds use the internet more frequently than they watch TV – 79% of this younger demographic use the internet between 5 and 7 days each week while 76% watch TV as regularly
More than 8 in 10 (83%) online Europeans use a broadband connection and over half (52%) of these broadband users are wireless
The most popular web activities amongst all European internet users include;
- email (76%), communicating via social networking sites (45%)
- instant messaging (40%)
- watching film, TV or video clips (32%)
- contributing to ratings and reviews (27%)
71% state that as a result of the internet they are staying in touch with friends and relatives more, half (50%) have chosen better products or services and 47% are better able to manage their finances online
55% of European internet users actively change their mind on what brand to buy after online research

Other relevant information provided in the report:

51% access the Internet on a PC
14% access the Internet via a mobile device
43% watch or downloading films and video or stream TV
80% of the population in Norway Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands access the Internet at least once a week, with the European average fixed at an estimated 54%

Source: http://www.eiaa.net/

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Christmas 2010: a snapshot of Online European Shoppers

Christophe Bernigaud — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 16:13:48 +0000

Today Monday November 29th is ‘Cyber Monday‘. The biggest shopping day of the year?

Or is it Monday December 6th 2010 referred as ‘Mega Monday‘ where sales are expected to hit over €uro 1million per minute…

October 2010, IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index is expected to increase by 16 per cent in 2010 vs. 2009 for online Christmas sales, reaching £6.4billion.

Different forecasts come from various sources. For instance, Hi Media expect the European online Christmas sales to represent over 10 per cent of the European overall Christmas sales, representing respectively €uro 32 billion of the overall €uro 313 billion.

The UK, Germany and France will represent the highest total spend for the Christmas 2010 season, accounting for 65 per cent of the overall European Christmas spend:

UK – €uro 77.2 billion
Germany – €uro 64.5 billion
France – €uro 62.5 billion
Spain – €uro 31.2 billion

Denmark, Norway and Sweden are forecasted to spend the least overall at €5.4bn, €6.1bn and €9.6bn respectively.

How strong is online Christmas shopping in Europe?

UK – highest in Europe with €uro 13 billion – i.e 17% of the overall 2010 UK retail Christmas sales
Germany – €uro 8.2 billion – i.e 13% of the overall 2010 Germany retail Christmas sales
France – €uro 6.3 billion – i.e 10% of the overall 2010 France retail Christmas sales
Spain – €uro 624 million- i.e 2% of the overall 2010 Spain retail Christmas sales

Norway will spend €uro 0.73 billion online and Denmark €uro 0.61 billion.

Pierpaolo Zollo, from Kelkoo says: “Internet sales across Europe are set to be more important than ever this Christmas, with consumers spending record amounts online, and online commerce acting as the primary driving force for overall retail growth during the festive season.”

Don’t forget to track your online audience thanks to free simple tools such as Google Analytics and make sure you run an online reputation management program.

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Search Engine Friendly CMS launches in German, Russian, and Italian

Sante J. Achille — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 15:34:02 +0000

SEOTOASTER is an Free and Open Source Search Engine Friendly Content Management System, with an ‘edit as you browse’ approach and simple interface.

SEOTOASTER enables open souce PHP developers to enhance the software at will with smarties, widgets, plugins, and even improve the core of the application while delivering to the entrepreneur, e-tailer, or local small business owner or marketer a Web marketing presence built to perform with search engines.

Earlier today SEOTOASTER was released in 3 new localised versions:

German
Russian
Italian

All versions of SEOTOASTER can be downloaded here.

Product Information: seotoaster.com

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Hitwise Ventures Outside English With France Launch. Oh la la!

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 15:53:25 +0000

Everyone in the online world depends on having good data in some way or other. Until ComScore rolled out qSearch in 150 countries, there was very little comparable data available to compare activities in different countries. Frequently, people would ask me what I thought of Hitwise and mostly I had to reply that I had very little to do with it (difficult if most of your work is not in English to consider an English-only tool). Now Experian is changing that by launching Hitwise in France. So that means we will know what’s going on in France right – or “Now You Know” to coin a well known phrase.

Well it’s not really quite like that. Note that in the introduction above I’m talking about ‘compare’ as opposed to measure. What the Hitwise move will do is to give us a different basis for comparing activity in France. It does not mean that we have either not been able to measure things before OR that there is no data available on French websites as the Xiti tool from AT Internet has been around for a long time. Whilst AT Internet does have operations outside France – France is its home base.

There is also the famous Baromètre which measures the shares of French, German, Spanish and UK search engines. Currently, this is showing Google advancing against all-comers – though when you are Google and you have 94.2% in Germany, 92.8% in Spain, 89.2% in France and 90.8% in the UK – are you really worried about Bing which performs best in France with 3.6%. Time will only tell.

Experian launches Hitwise Internet measurement services for France

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Email Marketing Consumer Report 2009

Sante J. Achille — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:57:43 +0000

ContactLab has released the results of a new study on the use of Email amongst European users. Habits, trends, and use of newsletters is examined for the following markets:

Italy
Spain
France
Germany
UK

The results are organized in different reports and in local languages (and English), along with a European Report released in all languages (English, Italian, French, Spanish, German)

You may download the reports here – Email validation is required

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Lufthansa To Offer Web Access Via Wifi

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 14:04:24 +0000

German flag-carrier Lufthansa has announced that it is to offer full web access via a wifi system and a satellite connection for all passengers in all flights and classes during the coming year. This will put pressure on more competitors to do the same.

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Dear Twitter, A Five Person Localisation Team is HUGE

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 09:05:16 +0000

Twitter announced via its blog that it is adding support for French, Italian, German and Spanish to the languages supported by its interface. Until now the system has only been available in English and Japanese. In its blog post it describes these languages as “Commonly referred to using the acronym FIGS and are often the starting point for services like Twitter when its time for more language support”. The languages will be added via a crowdsourcing interface.

There are some issues with this announcement. Firstly, the fact that Twitter has chosen to go for “FIGS” in other words French, Italian, German and Spanish is a habit which is very typical of English speaking companies because they assume they must be the most important languages. They may be, but they may also not be. What Twitter should have done (maybe they have and they don’t want to say) is checked what languages their users are working in and followed that – always play to your strengths. There’s a good chance they should have been looking at languages like Korean, Russian and Arabic – rather than FIGS. Another factor to take into account is that the FIGS languages use the same alphabet as English so users will, and have been, able to interpret what it’s all about more easily than speakers of Russian, Korean or Arabic.

The second issue is they’re using crowdsourcing ‘because they have a small team’. The Twitter interface is not large in localisation terms and it would have consumed less of their resources to have used traditional localisation for this small number of languages. It only makes sense to use crowdsourcing if they’re planning to localise in a very large number of languages. Dear Twitter, a few person team on a project like this is HUGE for most people not small!

Equally, they’re not even looking at the major language issues which Twitter faces such as people who wish to Tweet in multiple languages. Currently, some are opting to Tweet in two accounts to use two languages to avoid losing followers. Twitter should add more sophistication to this side of their system.

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ComScore Reveals Google Share by Market

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 17:39:39 +0000

Via Adage, ComScore has revealed the Google share by market showing the Google domination in many markets alongside discrepancies such as Korea where Google has a dismal share of the market. Western Europe has stronger Google shares than the US but the Mountain View monolith is most powerful in Brazil, Turkey and Italy.

Unfortunately, with China and Russia missing – the picture is somewhat one-sided.

Google Share by Market – ComScore

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Google expands new trademark policy – but sidesteps Europe

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Thu, 07 May 2009 22:12:38 +0000

Following the expansion of their trademark policy to the UK last year, Google has widened its looser trademark policy which basically allows all-comers to bid on trademark keywords increasing the cost of trademark advertising via the number one search engine and allowing competitors to aggressively buy each others ‘marks. The new change expands the ‘we won’t intervene’ approach to a total of 190 countries. The change comes into force on June 4th.

However, Google has sidestepped the key European countries with the strongest legal rules and where cases have cost Google most in fines (see list below). From calculations, the removal of protection for trademarked terms increases advertiser costs by as much as 80% – as well as taking revenue from additional advertisers on those terms. The policy, therefore, enables Google to increase its adverising take from advertisers. The approach also affects major global brands most significantly – because they generally spend proportionately more on advertising their brands because it is those brands – and the associated products – which have made them global.

Google has long struggled to persuade blue chip advertisers to move more of their advertising budgets to Google Adwords – this is step which leaves them with no choice. However, it is a dangerous move as it could also contribute to tipping the ROI see-saw towards other newer forms of promotion such as social media and Twitter.

Having received no significant kick-back from its UK change of a year ago – it’s no surprise that this is being rolled out now. Probably, another year will pass before more countries – especially European ones – are added. I predict that France, where the courts have levied the largest fines against Google, will be the last to go.

So the following countries (European Union countries in bold) will not see the change – at least yet. Via Search Engine Land

Austria
Belgium
Bulgaria
Czech Republic
Cyprus
Denmark
Finland
France
Greece
Germany
Hungary
Italy
Lithuania
Luxembourg
Netherlands
Poland
Portugal
Romania
Slovakia
Slovenia
Spain
Sweden

Australia
Bahamas
Brazil
China
Iceland
Macau
New Zealand
Norway
South Korea
Switzerland
Taiwan

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Forrester Research, Inc. data on mobile instant messaging (IM) in Europe

Sante J. Achille — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 10:16:50 +0000

A recent study from Forrester Research, Inc. indicates mobile instant messaging (IM) on the rise in Europe with 26.7 million users in 2007 and a projected 80 million users in 2013.

The survey was conducted on a sample of 22.000 consumers in:

France
Germany
Holland
Italy
Spain
Sweden
UK

Three years after the launch of IM mobile operators appear less than enthusiastic about this technology, fearing cannibalization of profits deriving from text messaging services (SMS), however the growth of IM is seen as “inevitable”

Niek van Veen, analyst di Forrester Research identifies IM as a means to differentiate mobile operators services and improve user experience.

All this will have a significant impact on web and search technology as mobile devices become an integral part of work and leisure.

Source: Spot and Web – N.15

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24 European states go borderless under Schengen

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 14:54:49 +0000

The Schengen agreement has been extended from 15 countries to 24 giving a wider borderless Europe with no internal border controls or checks and an open market of over 400 million people. Coming into force on the 21st December, the Schengen agreement makes physical inter-trade between bordering countries easier to manage for marketers. As Europe opens its borders, and search grows quickly in Europe, Schengen makes European business roll-outs more attractive and achievable with faster distribution and lower border costs.

The new countries joining the agreement are:-

Czech Republic
Slovakia
Poland
Hungary
Latvia
Lithuania
Estonia
Malta
Slovenia

I decided to test this with a visit to the most northerly Balkan state of Slovenia travelling from Austria through a 5 mile tunnel to the south side of the Alps. True enough the European blue flag and stars had become the standard border crossing notification and the rows of kiosks and border controls were empty and unmanned as we headed to the capital Ljublana.

Ljubljana is a town of around 230,000 people with a pretty baroque style and attractive old quarter. The local search engine is “Najdi” and the local domain is .si.

The Schengen agreement was first signed by five countries in 1985 in a small Luxembourg town ‘Schengen’ – these original five were later joined by ten others and the agreement came into force in 1995. The agreement basically means that the internal borders between the treaty countries are removed – but that those same countries cooperate to strengthen the outer border using the Schengen Information System – a database where data is exchanged. There are also special rules on how police forces work together.

The original five countries were:-

France
Germany
Netherlands
Belgium
Luxembourg

Other countries which joined up to 1995 when Schengen was finally realised are:-

Spain
Portugal
Greece

Countries who joined after 1995 but before 1997 are:-

Italy
Austria
Denmark
Norway
Sweden
Finland
Iceland
Monaco

The Schengen Agreement has only ever, in part, been deployed by the British or the Irish for fear of it encouraging immigration and terrorism – though it doesn’t seem to have helped much staying out.

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German online advertising to beat 800 million Euros in 2007

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 11:10:30 +0000

Futurezone brings us the news that the online advertising market in Germany is rocketing and expected to exceed 800 million Euros in 2007. That’s a 67% over the 480 million Euros seen in 2006. The figures are from the Bundesverbands Informationswirtschaft, Telekommunikation und neue Medien (BITKOM) run by Germany’s national newspaper “Die Welt”. This forecast for the full year is based on an increase of 68% in the first three quarters of the year.

This means that online advertising in Germany is still behind TV and print advertising – but from a growth rate point of view there is no comparison – online is taking off.

This story serves to back up the view that the European online market is growing very rapidly indeed. Germany is the largest economy in Europe and this pace of growth must eventually take it ahead of the UK. The figures don’t include the market in other German speaking countries and areas – such as Austria and Switzerland.

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EURid suspends 10,000 .EU names squatted in China

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 09:14:09 +0000

The .EU domain registrar management organisation, EURid has suspended 10,000 EU domain names which have been apparently legally registered by a Chinese woman – reports out-law. EURid has the power to remove the domain names from the woman – but has said that it would prefer a court to do it.

According to reports, the woman was buying the names to sell on to other parties at higher prices – nothing new in that then. EURid says that is has received complaints – not particularly new either. One key point is that only European-based organisations are allowed to hold .EU domain names.

Out-law carries this great quote from EURid, “When we screen our data bank we see that some people have an amazing amount of names. Nobody needs 10,000 names.” Strange. You’d have thought that EURid had a little more knowledge and insight about the industry in which they operate. Perhaps that’s why there were so many complaints at launch!

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Google webmaster tools starts to think international

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 17:20:03 +0000

At least two major new features are arriving in Google’s webmaster tools console according to information from the SES San Jose conference and the official Google webmaster tools blog.

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!

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What is happening to ASK in Europe? I must ask!

Kristjan Mar Hauksson — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 07:17:37 +0000

Recent studies have shown that in Germany Google leads with a market share of 88.5% (I though Google had a foothold in the UK with around 79%). Yahoo has just over 3%, followed by the only local engine, ISP T-Online with 2.2%. Others on the list with just under 1.5% are MSN and AOL.

Most surprisingly is however France that seams to have embraced this American invention, Google has just under 90% market share with Yahoo coming next with just over 3%, MSN has 2.48% with two locals following Orange and Free, 1.89% and 0.72%.

Noticeable is the total lack of ASK’s market share both in France and Germany. Also it’s worth noting that while Google has a large market share in the US it’s nothing when you compare their foothold in France, Germany and the UK.

But Google is not this strong everywhere in Europe. Neighbours to Germany are Swiss and there Google has just under 50% of the market with Yahoo’s healthy 22% following and MSN has around 11%. Russia has the strong Yandex Direct as shown here at Multilingual search on a regular basis.

If we look at Poland there worth noting that there are at least couple of strong locals, NetSprint, OnetSzukaj and Szukacz with combined market share of 20%. In Poland Google seems to have around 80%.

Google has a strong market share also in Slovakia but has a strong competition in SZN.sk.

Since the arrival of Google in Iceland in 2002, they have slowly gained around 50% of the market share with the local Leit staying strong at around 45% and the rest shares the remaining 5%. This is a according to research by Nordic eMarketing in early 2007.

It’s always good to know the search engine market shares in Europe ?

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European travel market to hit 25% of transactions online

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 13:52:22 +0000

A report by PhoCusWright Inc says that the European market on average will hit 25% of transactions carried out online during 2007 – this figure was achieved in the US in 2004.

There are, however some key differences in European markets:-

UK and German buying patterns are most similar to the US
France is behind the average thanks to low outbound travel and fewer low cost carriers
Spain and Italy are further behind thanks to lower broadband access and less internet use (and let’s face it if you live you don’t need to travel so much do you!!)

Via www.hotelexecutive.com

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AdTech Hamburg: Forrester VP Favier says Second Life will be the new Google

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Tue, 22 May 2007 17:56:42 +0000

Jaap Favier of Forrester ended his keynote speech to the first Hamburg AdTech by saying that, after all the research he’s done, Second Life will become the new Google.

It’s about searching for things and its a richer experience – Google is just about text, he said.

He presented findings from Forrester which categorise consumers into:-

Creators
Critics
Collectors
Couch potatoes

It sounds very similar to the ‘Diffusion of innovation’ curve which we all learned about in marketing with exactly the same approach required. Make contact and talk to the most important groups – here creators and critics – and let them tell the rest.

His full title is: Jaap Favier, Vice President, Research Director of Marketing & Customer Experience EMEA, Forrester Research

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European telecoms operators threaten US search hegemony

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 19:51:32 +0000

The UK’sTelegraph online reports that 12 of Europe’s largest telecoms operators – with one American firm – are planning to launch a mobile phone search engine to rival Google and Yahoo.

The companies concerned include Vodafone, France Telecom, Telefonica, Deutsche Telekom, Hutchison Whampoa, Telecom Italia and US firm Cingular. Combined, they have a user base of 600 million people – with some 20% in the UK expected to have broadband speed mobile phone access by the end of 2007.

According to The Telegraph, declining mobile phone revenues are forcing telecoms operators to look at all angles – and the lucrative search advertising market is clearly attractive. For telecoms operators it is very appealing to keep a larger percentage of the revenues rather than ’sharing’ with Google, Yahoo or Microsoft.

However, both Google and Yahoo have already done deals with mobile phone operators and it is not clear what impact this will have!

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