Last week Matt Cutts reminded readers of his Google search blog of what they were already clearly aware: Google makes hundreds — 500 this year alone — of changes to its search algorithm, most of them unannounced or unreported to keep the gamers at bay.
He did offer up ten changes the search engine has made recently that are not so easily manipulated to give the industry a sense of where Google is focused. For a complete list of the ten, go here.
A Nod to Global SEO Needs
Two of the ten focused on changes that should help brands with their global SEO marketing efforts. One is cross-language information retrieval updates. It is aimed at queries in languages where limited web content is available, such as Afrikaans, Malay, Slovak, Swahili, Hindi, Norwegian, Serbian, Catalan, Maltese, Macedonian, Albanian, Slovenian, Welsh and Icelandic.
Now, Google will translate relevant English web pages and display the translated titles directly below the English titles in the search results. This feature was available previously in Korean, but only at the bottom of the page, Cutts says. Clicking on the translated titles will take you to pages translated from English into the query language.
Another tweak reduces the number of long, sometimes arbitrary query predictions in Russian. "We will not make predictions that are very long in comparison either to the partial query or to the other predictions for that partial query," Cutts wrote.
Growing Global SEO Resources
Google’s tweaks come as other vendors are incorporating the need for global search capabilities into their products. Link-Assistant.Com, which offers SEO PowerSuite, has begun using Google GL (geographical location) parameter in its rank checking software.
The application focuses on a key challenge with global SEO — namely, that search results served by Google to searchers from different countries can vary, and tracking them is a challenge.
The search location feature in SEO PowerSuite lets users monitor website rankings as they are seen by searchers from different countries of the world.
Another example is BrightEdge, which at the beginning of the year introduced a global SEO platform, with Epicor as one of its first users.
Quality of Local SEO Varies. Tremendously.
These tools are becoming more valuable as companies struggle with the differences in local search around the world. In France and Spain the relative quality of SEO is lower compared to other countries, says WebCertain chief executive Andy Atkins-Kruger (via Retail Week). Therefore a company could find it easier and cheaper to implement a multilingual SEO strategy.
For Denmark or Germany, by contrast, a localized website and country-specific SEO strategy is essential due to the high level of ecommerce saturation and the high quality of local SEO.
These differences can be very nuanced too, which makes relying on machine translation, even for simple words, iffy.
For example, a mobile phone maker eager to break into China might consider translating English search terms to plug into a Chinese campaign, not realizing that the highest volume searches for cell phones in China come from a slang term, not the direct translation of cell phone, writes Elizabeth Elting for Business Insider.
There are a myriad number of ways a mistranslation can occur - a photo or creative for a campaign that is suddenly confusing because of a mistranslated word. The difference doesn’t even have to be significant - the translation could be literally correct but the subtleties still lost.
