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Panda is the name of an important update to Google’s search algorithm.

On the face of it Panda’s purpose is simply to remove the influence of content farms on search results, and thereby present  users with more relevant web sites to visit.

However, in his excellent analysis, Mark Nunney contends that Google’s aims are broader.

Quality sites with lots of unique content and good incoming links are not necessarily what people want to see, if for example they mostly contain expert content. So to improve the relevance of its search results Google is promoting sites with good quality content, but which also have low bounce rates (i.e. Google can see that people stay on the site and look at several pages).

Sites with a recognisable brand with many links and mentions elsewhere, such as in social media, also demonstrate to Google that the site is valued by users.

It makes sense. So what are the implications for the search results for your international web site and multilingual SEO?

1. If your English pages are not doing well in Google, then straight translations of your English content are highly unlikely to do any better. We knew this already, but now it is more important.
2. Content needs to be optimised for search terms in each language but also needs to be engaging to keep people on the site. In other words there needs to be some cultural input, but we knew this already too.
3. There must be clear navigation and links to more relevant content within each page.
4. Good design – it is an established fact that poor design dramatically worsens bounce rates. For B2C sites especially the use of different colours and images to suit local tastes should be considered.
5. Poorly localised content will send people away too.
6. The online visibility of your brand in other countries will affect your search results in those countries, so a social media presence in each language, multilingual email marketing and other online brand mentions have become more important.

In fact we already knew that all of these things are good practice for international SEO but it seems they could be more relevant now.

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Looking at the web site of a well known British manufacturer of consumer goods yesterday I was struck by how poor their efforts to localise their web site are.

The German translation isn’t bad, although you can tell it is a translation rather than fresh German copy. The way they have set up the URLs for the various language versions won’t help them to be seen in local search engines, but it is the web site localisation that really lets it down.

On a page where the technology infrastructure for the products is explained in German, it tells the reader that one technology standard is used “in the United Kingdom, in Denmark and in many other European countries“. No mention of Germany. Elsewhere it points the reader to an English web site with content meant for a British audience. On another page it describes in German an award from a British magazine.

It’s obvious that the page has been translated from English without any thought about the relevance of the content.

Although the site does have some good points, particularly the way users can find a local German dealer, the whole site has a foreign (i.e. British) feel to it. The trouble is that this isn’t very reassuring for local visitors to the site. People have many questions in their minds when they visit a web site and want to have them all answered before they will take any action. Instead this site gives them more questions than answers, not least of which is probably this BIG question, “Will this product, which is so obviously British, really work in Germany?”

There are some other details that should be put right too. Although they have a local telephone number in one place, they don’t in others – they give a +44 number. The title for the “About” page is literally translated as “Über”. In Germany though, people are used to always seeing an “Impressum” page, which includes all the legal details of the company, its place of business, names of the directors, business registration and tax numbers. Sometimes they have an “Über uns” page as well as, but not instead of, an Impressum page.

Good localisation matters if companies want to get results from their mulitlingual web sites. It matters as much as search marketing, design, navigation and content. People need to be sure before they will buy or do business with any company, local or foreign, that the product or service will do what they want it to and won’t cause them any problems.

British manufacturers that sell to businesses rather than consumers face similar issues, although they may not be as critical. Business buyers want to know that the company is taking their market seriously before they will consider their proposition. Manufacturers don’t need big sites but they should make sure that they localise the site well to show that they are in tune with the market they are selling into. In fact it may be better to keep a web site in English rather than to do it badly in another language.

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The Forum of Private Business has pointed out the new EU Consumer Rights Directive which comes into force on May 25th could have disastrous implications for small e-commerce companies.

They say that traders will be obliged to sell to every country in Europe under article 22a. This is highly undesirable for small businesses that may simply not be ready to deal with customers and their demands right across Europe. I won’t go into all the reasons why not, but currency and shipping are two main ones. The article also says that small companies may only be licensed to sell a product in one particular country which could cause a problem with suppliers if they start selling all over Europe.

However, EU law makes it illegal for suppliers to restrict selling by a distributor to one country only. It seems like unnecessary meddling by the bureaucrats but the new directive is at least consistent with past laws to encourage the working of the EU internal market.

The question is, how will they enforce this? Are they going to pursue some test cases? Imagine someone in Germany say, finding a site in England, all in English, and having to buy in Pounds. They would find no details about shipping to Germany, and if they did buy, would have to pay the currency conversion costs themselves. It’s unlikely, unless the product could not be bought in Germany, that they would buy.

It may be more likely in the smaller countries of the EU that they could not find the product locally and would try to place an order. So what would small e-commerce businesses do in this case?

To avoid a legal challenge they would have to ship the occassional order and/or try to find subtle ways of discouraging customers from other countries from buying through their web site. A strange situation indeed.

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Many people are by now aware of machine translation. Google Translate has made it so easy to see an instant web site translation in your own language. The results are remarkably good, but anyone who has used it will see that machine translated texts contain simple errors, like adding or missing out “the”, or major errors like putting parts of the translated sentence in the wrong order. The further the language is from your own language, i.e. Chinese to English, the worse it seems to be.

Google Toolbar

It’s easy to see this by going to a web site in another language and using Google translate, or another tool like Babelfish to translate a page into English. Better still, take a piece of text in English, translate it into another language using say Google Translate, and translate it back with Google Translate or another tool, and see what the differences are. Even between European languages, the meaning can be lost entirely.

Here’s one example, a line from a newspaper report today. “The risk is roughly one in seven that Europe’s ongoing debt crisis will push member nations to abandon the shared currency”

Translated into French by Babelfish : “Le risque est approximativement un dans sept qui Europe’ ; la crise continue de dette de s poussera des pays membres pour abandonner la devise partagée

Translated back into English by Google Translate “The risk is approximately one in seven that Europe ‘, the debt crisis continues to grow s member countries to abandon the currency shared”

Using Google only to translate back and forth actually got a much better result, but still with one error : “Le risque est à peu près un sur sept que la crise de l’Europe continue de la dette va pousser les pays membres à abandonner la monnaie commune.” This became : “The risk is about one in seven that the crisis of Europe continued debt will push member states to abandon the common currency”

It’s clear that machine translation is not good enough for marketing communications. If you are trying to put over the benefits of your product or engage people on a web site your copy needs to be right. Poorly translated material just adds to the overhead in understanding that your audience has to deal with. Every potential customer has a point at which the amount of interest they have in reading about you or your company is overtaken by the difficulty they have in finding or understanding the information they are looking for.

Machine translation is great for research to get the gist of what something is about. It is an effective tool that just wasn’t available to international businesses a few years ago. However there’s a danger in this because it is written communication. Care needs to be taken that a machine translation is not used as precise translation of meaning.

If you want to use machine translation to communicate in other languages it helps to make your English as simple as possible. Avoid jargon, colloquial langauge and references which only people in your country will understand – they are bound to make the translation worse than it needs to be.

Lastly, Google has just announced a deal with the European Patent Office (EPO) to use Google Translate to translate patents in 28 languages. See this by Lawdit, the e-commerce law solicitors. Google will benefit by learning more about translating patents and the EPO will benefit by having searchable patents available in all these languages. It raises questions as to how keyphrases will be translated because as we know from multilingual SEO techniques, people use search terms that are not necessarily direct translations. This will affect the quality of the search. No doubt Google will put something in place to overcome this issue and will learn a lot about how people typically search for patents online in multiple languages.

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This is a question I have been asked many times so here goes.

Assuming you accept the need for professional translation rather than using machine translation (which I hope you do!) for your external communications, then here are some things to look for when selecting an agency.

1. Mother tongue. It should only be translated by a person whose mother tongue is the target language. In other words, if you want to translate something from English into Turkish, it should be translated by a person whose mother tongue is Turkish and who understands English. Preferably that person lives in the country concerned too or has a close connection with that country.
2. Subject knowledge. The translator should have a good knowledge of the subject too, and in highly technical subjects for example the law, or aerospace engineering, should have training or experience in the subject area.
3. Training and experience. Some of the best agencies take lingusitcs graduates and train them in translation techniques. Some are trained in project management too so that they can manage large projects and make sure that deadlines and quality standards are met. The best translators are not necessarily formally trained but are very experienced in their subject areas.
4. Checking. When the translation has been done it needs to be proofread by another translator to check that the right meaning has been conveyed. Alternatively it could be proofread by someone in your company or by a business partner in the country concerned.
5. Many translation agencies now use computer aided translation software (CAT software). The idea is to make it easier for the translator and to provide consistency between translations. The software searches its database to look for similar sentences from past translations so that the translator can use them if appropriate. The software is not machine translation; a translator is still needed. The benefit of CAT software is that lots of time and therefore cost can be saved.
6. Glossary. If you are translating things for the first time into a new language it can be helpful to produce a glossary of industry terms. You can start this process internally by compiling a list of English terms you use in your literature which are specific to your industry or products. You could take it a stage further by asking someone in the country concerned (an employee or a distributor who knows your business) to give you the translation of each one. You then give this to the translation agency to use.
7. Prices. As quality is so important it may not be such a good idea to go for the cheapest quote unless they have a good quality record and references. To give you an indication of prices, UK translation agencies charge around £120 per 1000 words for to/from Western European languages, a little more for Eastern European languages, and around £150 per 1000 words for Middle Eastern and Asian languages.

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We have a new acronym to grapple with and it is IDNs. If you market your business internationally using your English domain name, and your domain name contains no keywords, it may not affect you. But if it does contain keywords, and if the equivalent keywords in the language contain non-English characters, you should register new domain names when they become available to protect your self from others buying them and hijacking your traffic.

If you use a translated brand name in a language which contains non-latin characters in your offline activities  you will soon be able to buy corresponding domain names for use online  and obviously it will be critical to make sure you get them!

The availability of domain names in languages using non-latin characters such Arabic, Chinese and Russian was announced by ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) two weeks ago and the first IDN went live this month. It is an Egyptian URL in Arabic. Until now web site owners in countries using non-latin characters have had to use domain names using only the ASCII character set, which consists of the 26 characters we have in English, plus 0-9 and a dash.

Now a system of transliteration has been agreed which translates the non-latin characters into ASCII, which is the only language that http understands. So from now on users will be able to type in domain names in Chinese, Arabic, Russian, Japanese etc and their browsers will translate them into a form of ASCII which the domain servers will understand.

Latin-script languages with special characters are also affected by this change. So it will be possible to register domain names using all the extra characters in Scandinavian, Slavonic, German, French, Spanish languages etc., for example www.smörgåskiosk.se.

The implications of this are that IDNs will have a role in further identifying the country and language that a domain is targetted at. It is a significant development for any business interested in multilingual web marketing and all that involves. Because domain names containing keywords have such importance for search engines, IDNs are an opportunity for companies to register new domain names in the countries they are targetting to get more visibility in local search engines.

And of course it still makes sense to register domains which you may need in future or which are brand related terms so that others cannot register them.

As a footnote to this some browsers are not yet able to handle international domain names so it is recommended that people update their browsers. As time goes on it is expected that more and more people will get used to typing in domain names using local characters.

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All eyes are back on China now that Google has pulled out of the market there, but the result has to be that it is business as usual. Google’s 50 million users in China will have to use the much larger local search engine Baidu, even though they may try for a while to use Google’s Hong Kong service.  That is not to say that the censorship and intrusion that drove Google away is a good thing and that it will have no negative effects. But growth just keeps coming in China, with or without Google.

At last count at the end of 2009 there were 384 million internet users there. A lot of the latest increase has come from mobile devices after China’s mobile industry launched 3G services last year.

An article by McKinsey researchers in Shanghai claims that people in the 60 major cities in China now spend 70% of their free time on the internet. In fact they use it more for entertainment than they do for work. This is having several effects. The internet has now become a vital tool to launch almost any new product as around 20% of internet users between 18-44 will not buy a product without researching it online first. Online advertising was worth $3 billion last year. Online events have been massively succesful.

The Chinese internet looks completely different than it does in the West. Youtube, Ebay, Google, Facebook etc. just are not the major players there. If anyone is still in any doubt that consumer web sites need to be localised, then look at China; not only local content, but from local online companies. A Common Sense Advisory survey says that 52% of users will not buy anything online if it is not in their own language.

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Charlie Bean, deputy governor of the Bank of England, made a speech last night which was reported in the Telegraph this morning. One of the things he is worried about is that exports have not increased since the depreciation of the Pound.

See point 3 in this article

He is right of course, but I find it worrying that he has taken so long to reach to reach these conclusions, because to anyone involved in exporting they seem rather obvious. If he and the politicians had taken time out to talk to UK exporters when the pound fell last year they would have understood immediately that you can’t switch on exports like a tap (with the possible exception of commodity trading). It takes time to grow business in new markets and its not just about investment confidence either.

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If you would like your ecommerce site to expand into another country or countries one of the first questions you will face is whether to translate your domain name.

If your domain name is descriptive, for example quitecheapbusinesscards.co.uk, then a translation (assuming the local domain is available) will do fine especially if that translation contains popular key words. But if you have a name like purplegerbil.co.uk, which carries your brand, you will have to consider whether it will work for you in the countries you are targetting.

Car4you targets Swiss customers

These pictures show that at least some countries are happy with English names, in fact for many internet users a domain name which uses English words is quite cool. People all over the world use Facebook, Youtube, MySpace – names which are made up of English words. Amongst the top 20 web sites in France are these names; skyrock.com, dailymotion.com and orange.fr.

MrJet.se city breaks advert in Stockholm

So if you have a strong brand in the UK, I would suggest that you could use that name succesfully in at least some of your new markets. Check first of all though that the words don’t mean anything unfortunate in the markets you are targetting. A Chinese friend of mine has started an online camping business in mainland China. He calls it “Lovecamp” in English. Of course this means something more than he intended but luckily he has no plans to enter an English-speaking market!

The name should ideally be easy to pronounce by the people in the country concerned. Names like Strawberry and Purple Gerbil may be difficult to pronounce for some people – the fewer syallables the better. It is almost certainly advisable to consult several local people from your target group and your local business partner before deciding on a domain name.

One last thing to consider. Domain names contains containing key words or phrases can help your search marketing efforts. So if your German domain name were www.babygeschenke.de it would be easier to get it to rank for Babygeschenke (baby gifts) in German search engines than if you use your branded domain name.

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An academic and linguist talking on Radio 4 recently said that half the world’s population now texts, which is astonishing when you consider that the first SMS message was sent by a Vodafone employee just down the road from us in Newbury as recently as 1992.

For exporters this is noteworthy for a couple of reasons. Firstly, 3 billion people now have a mobile device they can communicate with. Secondly, it shows how markets develop in unforeseen ways. No-one in the mobile industry in 1992 expected SMS messaging to take off as it has done and certainly nobody predicted that most that growth would come from developing countries.

When Chinese handset manufacturer Ningbo Bird started selling very cheap handsets to poor areas in Western China, it provided a massive impetus to mobile phone growth in China. Nowadays it’s often local companies in developing countries that are adapting technologies to meet local needs in smart new ways. So the UK’s exporters have to do more than just provide innovative new technologies. They have to understand their markets and work with local partners as flexibly as possible to meet local needs.