Every face tells a story

Thankfully the headline is not a reference to the, er, classic Cliff Richard single from 1997, but describes quite nicely the results of the Oban Multilingual 'Face of Global Search' survey.

Following the release today of the survey looking at online travel search habits, Greig Holbrook, director of Oban Multilingual, has also penned some analysis of the results:

What the results clearly show is that travel search is a very culturally diverse activity and that search plays a huge part in both the research and purchase of holidays for global travellers.

The growth in Chinese on the web has been phenomenal and reflects the fact that over 900 million people on the web don't speak English (around 70%).

Ninety-nine percent of those people who took part in the research indicated that they have booked travel online at some point. This once again reflects the fact that globally, people are becoming increasingly familiar with booking their travel online.

This means that suppliers not only need to cater from them in their own language but also, as much as possible, allow them to buy successfully from the site. This means the sites need to be very well localised to reflect all search and online purchase behaviours.

Chinese travel searchers don't seem to want to use Google, often preferring their own engines like Baidu much more. With the huge increase in Chinese searchers actually buying online in 2006-2007, it makes more sense than ever to make sure that optimisation for China is focused on local search engines.

It is not surprising that travellers going to different place are looking for different web features. International travel searchers are becoming more specific in their online behaviours so that in addition to multilingual web optimisation, global social media optimisation also needs to take place. In this context, a site properly optimised social media that is visible to a variety of cultures will prosper.

The finding that those who look for multilingual websites tend to avoid Google reflects the fact that international searchers are increasingly demanding good quality multilingual sites which are visible in their own search engines and not simply on Google, as Google is very often not the preferred engine or method for sourcing travel bookings.

In terms of Spanish people travelling to the UK, we have already found that travel sites often fail to provide good optimisation in Spanish for visitors who are seeking to visit the UK.

Spanish people may use some English phrases to search or they may use Spanish, but very few travel sites provide them with the experience they need so they are often forced to use English sites.

There is a great opportunity for travel companies to tap into the demand for travel from Spanish searchers; both for holidays within Spain and for travelling elsewhere like the UK.

Greig Holbrook, director, Oban Multilingual

What happened to the Long Tail of search?

Many of us will remember how, just a few years ago, many search engines and digital marketing agencies espoused the benefits of bidding for long tail search queries.

It was widely believed in some circles – indeed, some evangelised continuously – that users would gradually use a selection of keywords when searching, especially for travel products.

The theory went that search phrases such as “holiday rome”, for example, would be replaced by something along the lines of “city break rome pantheon april gatwick four star”.

There were some who even suggested long tail search queries would transform keyword bidding and SEO practices within two years.

So did it happen?

The MD of a London-based search agency, whom we met with yesterday, suggests it has not at all.

Consumers, our man with the data tells us, are refining their search phrase each time, rather than using long tail search queries to find specific travel product if they do not find appropriate results the first time.

For example: “holiday rome” becomes “city break rome” or “weekend away vatican” or “hotel rome weekend”. The use of lengthy and detailed phrases to hopefully narrow the number of results just hasn’t proven popular as many first believed.

What are the reasons for this?

Consumers may be sceptical that long, meandering search phrases do not return the required and, most importantly, quality information.

Secondly, users have perhaps found that refining the initial search with more detail is a far more successful method.

Or it could be something else entirely.

Indeed, these could be the wildly incorrect thoughts of a crazy digital marketer, so any additional comments readers have would be much appreciated.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Google search trademark - Open Thread

It feels like we've reached a pivotal moment in the long running Google saga.

A new dedicated page - The Google brand name policy switch - on the main Travolution website has all the articles and blog posts over the past six weeks, plus a selection of other articles from around the web and resources for advertisers and agencies.

But now it's time for a discussion. Use the comments section to kickstart the debate.

* What has been the impact on your business so far?
* Do you support Teletext or Directline?
* Are you a 'little guy' enjoying the chance to spread your message into new channels?
* Would you join a cross-industry challenge against Google?

Or

* Why can't we just move on...?

Full coverage here.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Future growth in display, not search

Or so says, Tim Brown, managing director of Blue Lithium EU.

The forecast came during a forum on ad networks at the AOP this week.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: PPC display advertising AOP

Google says Microsoft-Yahoo deal would be trouble for the web

Google's only response to Microsoft's hostile approach for rival portal/search engine Yahoo! comes via a official blog post from David Drummond, senior vice president for corporate development and chief legal officer.

If anyone thought a deal between Microsoft and Yahoo! would be plain sailing... think again.

In fact, Google's comments are nothing short of hostile.

Drummond says:

Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC? While the Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies - and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets.

Could the acquisition of Yahoo! allow Microsoft - despite its legacy of serious legal and regulatory offenses - to extend unfair practices from browsers and operating systems to the Internet? In addition, Microsoft plus Yahoo! equals an overwhelming share of instant messaging and web email accounts.

The gloves are off.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Yahoo+Microsoft - travel sites in the UK probably won't care too much

Clearly the biggest story kicking about today concerns Microsoft's "audacious" (or so says the MediaGuardian, which loves the hyperbole of it all) bid for Yahoo!.

Microhoo or YaSoft? Both sound rubbish.

A letter to the Yahoo! board last night proposed a £22.4 billion takeover of the company.

The Silicon Valley blogs are going crazy with excitement. [Excellent coverage of a Microsoft conference call]

From a search point of view you can see why the Americans can hardly contain themselves.

Yahoo share coupled with Microsoft's is around 33% of the market (Comscore), against Google's 58%, meaning it would certainly have a decent challenger in the US if the two combined.

In the UK, however, it would be a different story. Google currently commands between a 75% and 80% share of the market, depending on which measurement you use.

Nevertheless it completely dominates the search market here.

From a travel perspective I would hazard a guess that a takeover would hardly send digital marketers skipping happily into balmy sunset.

Almost everyone we have talked to in the past year or so has spoken admirably of Panama (YSM's search platform) and Microsoft's AdCenter - "but without the volumes there is not much point".

Where this proposed takeover might make a difference is in the area of portals.

Yahoo has a sizeable travel portal (and there's always Kelkoo!). Microsoft has the Live network.

Search plays a part in the all this, but I wonder if the takeover is more of a way of reaching consumers with other services.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: yahoo microsoft google

The end of the subscription model

Or so it would seem.

Web users "prefer ads to charges".

There are plenty of travel websites out there who must be thinking their so-called exclusive content, hidden behind a subscription wall, needs to be unleashed on users.

Good for SEO, too.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Google says Page Rank selling is naughty

A follow up from last week's Page Rank shenanigans.

Google man Matt Cutts has shed some more light on the issue, via Search Engine Journal, admitting the update was "primarily regarding PageRank selling and the forward links of sites".

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: page rank SEO affiliate text link

Selling text links is bad for travel sites - official

A string of websites and blogs are up in arms over what are some rather fundamental changes to the Google algorithm, which in turn has hit website Page Ranks.

The crux of the issue is this: Google is understood to be punishing websites that sell text-based links to third parties by reducing their relevancy or authority mark, or Page Rank.

This in turn affects their position of keyword search results.

Full coverage of the issue on SearchEngineLand and SEOMoz.

A few emails into Travolution today asking about the impact, if any, on travel sites.

Well at first glance it looks like some blogs (the legendary John Chow, for one) and a number of media sites (including the Washington Post, Chicago Sun-Times and Forbes) are nursing some pretty serious wounds to their Page Rank.

We have only learnt so far of two travel-related sites affected: World66.com (PR7 to PR4) and Beachhouse.com (also PR7 to PR4).

The chief operations officer of a leading SEO agency told us a number of travel sites could find themselves with a “bit of a situation” on their hands if Google continues its crackdown.

The problem, however, is that there is a huge “grey area” in what Google is doing.

If a website is selling a text link to a third party and the ad copy is relevant to the content, why - asks our correspondent - should the site be punished?

Indeed, a site which has a landing page about Paris may well be penalised simply because it has sold some text links on the same page to, say, a group of city break operators?

On the other hand, the opposite scenario is where some education sites (mainly US universities, which typically have a high authority ranking) have sold links to sites selling Viagra, simply because they know the ad can command a high price.

Either way, Google is cracking down. The short term answer is to probably to stop selling any text ads, if possible.

Another emailer asked: "So what about affiliates?"

We spoke to Commission Junction, part of the ValueClick empire, asking whether as a network it would purchase text links on behalf of clients.

The worry here, email to us by one SME tour operator, is that if Google reduces the page rank of sites containing links bought by affiliate networks, then the number of leads will fall, sales may fall, etc.

The network does not purchase text links, it said, and therefore those using its platform as affiliate merchants will not be affected directly. Of course the host site may well be flogging text ads to others and they will be hit by association.

One mildly amusing irony of all this is that, despite Google’s attempts to crack down on those selling text link ads, type “text link ads” into its search engine and the world’s biggest search engine is happily taking pay-per-click advertising from the likes of TextLinksAds.com, Onewaytextlinks.com and Textlinkbrokers.com. [We did not sell these links!!]

A quick call to Google this afternoon revealed nothing apart from a very carefully worded statement, emailed back a few hours later:

"Google is always working to improve the ways that we generate relevant search results and update our opinions of sites' reputations across the web.

"The Google Toolbar shows an indicator of PageRank, which is Google's opinion of the reputation of a webpage.

"Values in the Google Toolbar can fluctuate for a number of normal reasons, including changes in how we crawl or index the web, or changes in the link structure of the web itself.

"In addition, Google may update the visible PageRank indicator in the Google Toolbar to incorporate not only our view on the backlinks to a page or site, but also to incorporate our opinion of the forward links for a site."

This is clearly going to rumble on and on. Any comments from SEO agencies or other victims?

[ProBlogger has some good analysis and advice for bloggers]

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: page rank SEO affiliate text link

Google Page Rank - anyone hit?

Full post coming later on - just trying to get to the bottom of this story in terms of travel.

Have any readers seen their Google Page Rank plummet in the last few days?

Lots of theories being banded around. We've spoken to an SEO agency and an affiliate network and will report back later.

Leave a message in the comments section or email me.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: page rank

The top 10 errors of international SEO

A lengthy but excellent post here from one of our guest bloggers, Andy Atkins-Krüger, managing director of Web Certain:

Putting this post together, I realised why so many expert highly successful SEOs don’t enjoy the same success when they go international; the potential pitfalls are simply different. All their years of experience and their gut instincts don’t give them the right answers.

I remember my days training people to sail racing dinghies. Newcomers always made the same error – the yacht would heal as the wind filled the sails – but, instead of leaning out and backwards from the dinghy creating a counterbalance, our trainees would head for the middle and WALLOP – get very wet.

Dripping wet international SEOs, are towelling themselves off from similar experiences internationally! From personal experience I have seen errors in the international field which range from highly technical subtle differences – to pure rank stupidity.

Let’s get the really stupid one out of the way first.

Error One: IP Redirection

An international web-based company with a site which targets the far east to Europe and north America wants to point its US visits away from a very popular UK site. Easy, let’s just point all the American IP addresses over to our international dot com site, they say. Clap clap, job done. Days later traffic levels don’t just go off a cliff they dig a trench in the ravine and the ER team (Web Certain in whites) is called in. Now don’t you just know that they redirected the search engine crawlers too – wasn’t that obvious to you…?

Error Two: Autotranslation

I once came across a site where all of its non-English content had been auto-translated – to generate traffic. The problem was that our team of non-auto-translators (we call them that to keep them on their toes) couldn’t understand the first thing about the content – it was so far from having any value. In fact, it was easier to for them to work from the original English. Now in that process of autotranslation, our carefully crafted keywords become thoroughly mangled. In fact I’m starting a campaign to get the words “AUTOTRANSLATIOM KILLS KEYWORDS” added as warning on the packet.

Error Three: Assume everyone speaks English

Not exactly an SEO error – but certainly a missed opportunity as well as a cultural one. This presents difficulties on two levels; the audience may well understand English – but if you’re trying to persuade them to buy something – you’re going to be more successful talking to them in their own language, especially as your competitors are probably already doing that.

But there is a second reason why this is an error: the scope for keyword variety and therefore maximum potential for the site is much reduced by not expanding into the customer’s own languages.

Error Four: Several languages on the same page

This seems to crop up less frequently but not so long ago there was a fashion for the same web page to be published in, for example, English, French and German in different columns. However, this error still crops up but more subtlely and less deliberately where the metatags and page content are in different languages – and this we see frequently particularly for sites run by content management systems.

Error Five: No local inbound links

Today it is common knowledge that to succeed with search engines you need to have inbound links. But that becomes doubly more complex when you have different countries and languages to consider – and you need links from both. You can have some really strange things happen with page rank between countries too and a high page rank does not guarantee success in a particular language (because often the inbound links have been linked in English).

Error Six: Using only a dot com

This is a truly world phenomenon. So many organisations find that for either political or technical reasons – or because they think it looks good – they end up with a dot com and can’t shift from it. There are ways of mitigating the impact of this of course – like local links – but the people who will win the good fight in the end are those with the local country domains.

Error Seven: Duplication of content between countries

The way this happens is that the company hierarchy bounces the most recent web budget asking why it’s costing so much – “And why do we have translation costs for both Germany AND Austria – don’t they speak the same language”. They do of course – but an Austrian page in German is going to disappear into the ether in search engine listings terms. The reason is because it will be a duplicate of the same page in the company’s German site – which on a law of averages will be better linked because German is just a touch bigger than Austria (don’t tell the in-laws…). So you may need special content – just for the Austrians please.

Error Eight: Javascript changes the language content

This happens more often than you might think where javascript – controls the language setting of the page and pulls in a different language to the same template following the user’s instruction. The problem is that search engine crawlers don’t follow javascript navigation (which this is of course) so languages other than the default (English usually) just disappear.

Error Nine: Links in a different language to content

Now how many times have I seen this – or error messages the same. Let’s assume the main navigation has been changed, there are many sites where you still find odd little links in the footer – that really should have been translated and haven’t been. One or two and you’ll get away with it possible – but don’t overdo it!

Error Ten: Language code not set to the correct language

Very common – and the more minor of our peccadilloes for today. In fact, I did a study of this a few years ago and found that the majority of the Government web sites around Europe were actually encoded ‘en’ for general English and it didn’t have a huge impact on their rankings (thanks to being link loved by their own communities of course).

Summary

The above 10 errors are not the whole story. All the normal SEO errors still apply and I haven’t delved into the depths of hosting which is a whole story in its own right. But the fact is that the above errors are repeated so often that I think this must be a useful checklist to avoid the most typical pitfalls. Now I’m going back to our non-automatic non-alien humanoid team (otherwise known as international SEO experts from around the globe) to see the latest little linguistic challenge the world of SEO has brought to us.

Andy Atkins-Krüger, managing director, Web Certain

Technorati tags: seo search engine optimisation

Google is confusing the Aussies

The Times happily gives over a page lead today to a potentially explosive court case in Australia.

According to Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, Google is apparently not doing enough to "expressly distinguish" the difference between paid-for advertising (sponsored links) and natural search results.

[Full ACCC citation here]

How strange. Sponsored links boxes are clearly labelled as such, whether they appear at the top of a page or down the right hand side.

Google has reacted pretty strongly to the action.

"Google Australia believes that these claims are without merit and we will defend against them vigorously. They represent an attack on all search engines and the Australian businesses, large and small, who use them to connect with customers throughout the world."

Peter Coroneos, chief executive of the Internet Industry Association, has also waded into the row:

"The internet industry has always had a positive relationship with the ACCC. It's very unfortunate that the ACCC has decided to pursue a litigious strategy against one participant, rather than consulting more broadly on an issue that affects the entire industry."

What made the Times report even more interesting was its choice for an image to accompany the story: a screen grab from Google.co.uk, featuring - you guessed it - a travel seach query.

Cheapflights and ThomsonFly came in first and fourth place respectively for sponsored search results and in first and second for organic results. [marks are on the original Times article]

Paul Dolman, CTO and head of paid search at digital marketing agency Spannerworks, who count both Cheapflights and Thomson as clients, was equally dismissive of the claim from Down Under.

In fact, he says, newspapers have been placing ads and editorial (the equivalent of paid-for and natural search in Google) "for centuries".

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: australia competition consumer

The Joy of SEO

Search engine optimisation can be a fickle business at times. Indeed, travel companies up and down the land are known to agonise long into the night about where they appear on that Official Gateway to Instant Traffic, Google.

Digital marketing agencies are appointed; months are spent on designing Google-friendly landing pages; complicated keyword folksonomies are created – all in the hope that the consumer will chance upon seeing an entry in natural search listings for a company, product or destination.

And then some upstart comes along and shows them how it’s done, without any special investment.

Type “flight search engine” into Google and appearing in first place, as you might expect, is a high profile meta search engine – Skyscanner, in this case.

But what is this? In second place is that pesky Travel-Rants consumer blog.

In fact, the US version of Sidestep, IfYouSki, GooFlight and VisitBritain are the only pureplay "flight search engines" to appear on the first page.

So, well done to Mr Cronian of Travel-Rants – a developer by day with a passion for travel, writing his blog purely as a hobby.

The message here is simple: good content – or content deemed important by others on the web – can be as valuable as any investment in a digital marketing strategy.

NB: If anyone doubts whether “flight search engine” is a phrase in demand (it not being destination specific, for example), just check out the number of companies bidding against it in Google’s pay-per-click listings.

TravelSupermarket, Travelzoo, Opodo, Ebookers, Airline-Network, Kayak, SkyScanner (again), DialAFlight, Expedia and Travelocity obviously consider it worth paying money for every click.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: search engine SEO pay-per-click natural search

Travolution@E4T - Expedia could charge suppliers for leads

Mild rumblings of discontent this morning at the EyeForTravel conference in London when Expedia said online travel agencies may have to take action as more of those pesky consumers are using the site as a search engine and then make a booking direct with suppliers.

Murad Hajeebhoy, vice president for lodging and destination services, said their could be a situation in the future when OTAs would consider charging suppliers for referrals.

"This is one of the possibilities" and, of course, is purely hypothetical, Hajeebhoy assured us after his Q&A session.

Needless to say, Expedia and other online travel agencies would certainly have some tricky conversations with suppliers if it decided to implement such a scheme.

Chris Silcock from Hilton, during the session, didn't appear too keen, to say the least...

Hajeebhoy said he was unclear as to how such a system would work - complicated tracking for cost-per-acquisition or a cost-per-click system?

It is very interesting that Expedia is at least thinking about this model. But what does it say about their motivation?

Are the OTAs finally acting because a huge amount of traffic is coming but so little is converting?

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: expedia

Click fraud on the rise...

Click Forensics, Inc. , a self-described independent analysis company, today released industry pay-per-click (PPC) fraud figures for the first quarter 2007.

The results are not good.

The Click Fraud Index , as it is aptly named, found that the overall industry average click fraud rate was 14.8% for Q1 2007 versus 13.7% for the same period a year ago.

The average click fraud rate of PPC advertisements appearing on search engine content networks was 21.9%, versus 19.2% last year.

The industry average click fraud rate for high-priced search terms (defined as those costing more than $2) was 22.2%, up from 20.9%.

“It appears that click fraud perpetrators are becoming more sophisticated even as search providers step up their efforts to fight click fraud,” said Tom Cuthbert, president and CEO of Click Forensics, Inc. “Click fraud seems to be following a similar path as other online fraud schemes such as spam and phishing - the problem is growing as fraudsters fine tune their methods.”

(It's always a few bad apples who have to ruin things for the rest of us.)

If you've not already read the most recent issue of Travolution cover-to-cover (and I know most of you good boys and girls have), check out "The Dark Side of Search" article, penned by our newest contributor, Adam Woods, for an in-depth discussion on this increasingly worrying topic.

Tricia Holly Davis, chief writer, Travolution

Technorati tags: fraud hijacking

AC Hotels banned by Google

Fascinating post on the excellent Blog on Travel about Spanish hotel brand AC Hotels, which has apparently been de-listed by Google.

The post explains at length perhaps why the chain has fallen foul of the search engine giant.

But in a nutshell:

• Poor SEO
• Mis-use of Flash
• Bad meta-tagging

Tom's post is well worth a read. [Check the comments at the end - especially the one about the MD of AC Hotels and his supposed opinions of the internet]

Kevin may, editor, Travolution