“These strategic partnerships demonstrate Yahoo!’s continued momentum, building on seven previous partnerships with Asian mobile operators and reinforce Yahoo!’s strong leadership position in mobile audience reach, mobile search services and mobile advertising,” the company said in a statement.

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 domains will cover China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and other asian countries.

The 8 countries are:-

In 2008 it is estimated that 17.2% of marketing spend in the UK will dedicated to online and online will be ahead of cinema and outdoor forms of advertising and not far behind radio. Smaller advertisers in particular are to benefit from the affordability and targeting capabilities of the internet (which means ’search’ to you and me!!)

Internet advertising expenditure is to rise globally by 84% between 2005 and 2008.

“I again call on China’s Communist government and on multinationals that have sacrificed freedom of speech for corporate profits, including well known companies such as Yahoo and Google, to respect democracy and freedom, because it is the correct way to ensure continuous future development,” Chen said in the speech last Friday.

Source: PC Advisor

Source: Keynote

“Fluency in English and Romanian is required. Bulgarian language skills are a plus. ” sounds like Google has decided to focus on Romania for now. With an online population of over 5 000 000 users (CIA’s World Factbook 2004) Romania indeed seems more attractive compared with the 1 800 000 internet users in Bulgaria.

Form the same page on Google’s website it is visible that the company is expanding its international activities in many directions. There is a strong focus on South America as the list includes Chile, Argentina, Columbia, Costa Rica, Peru and Puerto Rico. The Far East also gets a lot of attention from the giant in search. Regional representatives are to be hired in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and Oceania.

Sources Ecommerce Times| Bloomberg

Source Tapei Times

Source: CTV Inc.