Bill On Business

Should you be very bored or have a penchant for the migration of assetts across borders, here is the EU Customs & Taxation Unions short guide of how to charge VAT across EU member states

http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/taxation/vat/how_vat_works/vat_on_services/index_en.htm

Enjoy.

I remember my L1 US Visa application process when I moved to USA for Ask.com

Apart from the glamour of Oakland,CA (North Silicon Valley…..no…really) the visa application process was hilarious. By the time HR had finished the write-up it literally said ‘Bill will be an asset to US National Security’ (my team used to do stuff like track inappropriate content publishers)

The L1 document was the least British self deprecating process ever. Nothing in my 3 pages of  ’why Bill should be allowed to go to the US’ was anything but true, but it was also like the most positive..caffeine fuelled new manager giving you a staff review during a cross-country run.

Yesterday I had to step into cover a colleague who couldn’t talk at SES. Typically I keep a fairly low profile and and work on technology, human relationship or financial levers to business and stay out the spotlight. Anyhow…at very short notice I had to prep a talk for the UK State of Search industry panel and supply a biog. Quickly  written on blackberry during the fire alarm at Google’s Avinash talk…I sent it off in 90 secs and thought no more of it.

It just appeared in my Google alerts and it was like a flashback to the L1 process..only this time I’d written it and am blushing at the megalomania sound of it. Then I read around for a while on different sites and you’ll notice something about most biogs…how few people talk about their roles as parts in successful teams and focus on a very singular voice of ‘I made xyz’ as if the successful team element dilutes rather boosts their relevance to the world….certainly everyone led and true as it may be, ‘collaborated to achieve’ is less present.

I don’t know about you but it’s harder and harder to strike out alone and deliver something without being part of a team….and it’s great teams that get the results in most of the world I live in. If I could never lead a tech initiative again, but just make teams work consistently excellently I’d be cool with that.

On this point, not progressive enough yet to rework my client pitch bio sheets, but maybe one day I’ll take the leap and say:

‘Was part of a great team. Full Stop. The company did xyz. Full Stop. We learnt xyz. End.

So..time to eat my own 2am love up advice.

Shout out to my old peeps..a truly amazing gang I was honoured to work with and miss everyday…. Gary Chevsky (Engineer 1 and THE man at Ask.com, also my old boss), Steve Orr (still at Ask.com 11 years in and resident genius, 3 way co-parent of Smart Answers), Mike Tierney (All your tech is happens now), Michiel Frishert (we’ll always have maps), Rona ‘eat my TFE mod/ don’t you dare’ Yang, Charlise ’paint my cake, eat my SA’ Tiee, Hope (NY Gentry Dictionary Empress) Hackett, Scott ‘Make Rocket Go’ the Visionmeister Grieder, Mike ’would you like an affiliate ID with that…no..I’ll fire you next time’  Poynter, Vlad ’Ukrainian Matinee Idol’ Sayenko, Vlad my Russian friend and last but in my UK team 1st…Hugh ‘Laughing Lord Lucan’ Poynton. You were it, we was there..and it was a pleasure to do my little bit along side you. All the best to my old Ask.com friends still fighting the good fight. …and maybe one day Ask.com will…..well… youknow.

See you in 51o.  

(Apologies to those I missed out…thing about teams…so damn many people to love)

Books are being burnt to keep warm and the weak and wounded getting hungry looks from SEOers. 

Twitter is down during SES London and it’s really just business as usual but goddamit I need to Tweet that Twitter is down. 

Humbled by Twitter offline ness, I’ve been forced to go back to my blog for a reunion. 

Not that I Tweet much or blog much anymore as work eats my life, 

But I’ve noticed that whilst 140 char Tweet on the lack of Twitter (ironic/unlikely surely) could be an interesting Tweet…as a blog article it really……..isn’t. 

Twitter Outage promotes new G8 vote on social media law?

I’ve just launched a new blog on Search Quality at http://blog.searchenginequality.com/ 

The focus is on improving search relevancy, freshness, spam reduction and a myriad of other themes that paid my wages for 8 years and still very much remain a key interest of mine. There may be the occasional post on SEO and PPC that are relevant to agency types but for the most part I’ll be writing about Search Engine Quality issues.

How warnings of being “Penalized by Google” can sometimes be the online equivilent of the big bad wolf.

Clients are often be told by SEO consultants that a wide range of technical issues will lead to their website being “penalized by search engines”, notably Google.

The fundamental message this sends is inaccurate. This message can lead to dogged adherence to change without good business reason or SEO advice being disregarded as scaremongering.

There is only a small range of activities that search engines actively penalize, yet many reasons for poor performance that could appear to be penalties if cruedely interpreted.

This is not to say that search engines do not heavily favour certain sites for reasons other than pure query-document match relevancy but thats another post altogether.

Being organized and conforming to expected standards = Good SEO (blazing a trail is to be encouraged but be aware search engines take a while to catch up, and only follow the trends that have significant human user traffic already)

So here is my offline metaphor to explain why the penalties are not always penaties. Lets compare SEO and crossing international borders.

Event: Imagine arriving at JFK to change flights to San Francisco, on a last minute bargain single ticket & forgetting the address of your hotel. Casually mention your girlfriend lives in SF and it’s a romantic surprise visit. Several hours later, as you leave secondary interviews, you’ll have missed your onward flight with no recourse, face overnight hotels at your expense, a 24 hour delay and the costs of an airport issued ticket home to reassure US Immigration. Your Intentions? Good, Your Outcomes?, Bad.

But it’s important to realise none of the inconvenience “caused by US Immigration” was motivated by a desire to punish.

Analysis: The passenger was not trusted to perform as expected, had failed to conform to system requirements and had to be processed in a secondary manner requiring multiple research activities from a resource constrained team and systems.

Unlikely as it seems this scenario happens every day at airports around the world.

Event: The online equivalent of this story is a website re-launching without a URL cutover strategy, integrating large volumes of third party feed into it’s pages, not publishing a valid sitemap at an easily found location, with hard to interpret dynamic URLs and no inbound links as years of link equity is lost to 404 error pages. Site traffic drops precipitously for 90 days while the programme sponsor rides out the turbulence spending valuable time reassuring senior stakeholders everything is going to be ok and there will be a positive ROI. Of course it normally does, but it’s been stressful.

None of the inconvenience “caused by Google” was motivated by a desire to punish.

Analysis: The website was not trusted to perform as expected, had failed to conform to expected standards and had to be processed in a secondary manner requiring multiple research activities from a resource constrained team and systems.

Unlikely as it seems this scenario happens every day at huge online companies around the world.

Detect Duplicate Content – Think Like a Search Engine

A client’s copywriter recently went to lengths to show how he could reword copy to avoid duplicate content challenges by merely moving paragraphs and sentences around.

The copywriter was certain any search system could be outsmarted by moving text positions and syntax around because that would be theoretically so complex to monitor on a large scale that surely a search engine would not have the resources to cope.

Without going into the depths of duplicate content systems, content , scalable search systems or if he is right that you can blag it… it is worth thinking like a search engine for a minute but keeping things simple.

Rather than use search engine results or search systems to examine his plan, I resorted to the suitable unassuming MS Word.

By using a MS Word macro to calculate word frequency and total unique word count you can quickly see shortcuts to calculating document uniqueness without stopping by MIT for 4 years.

I compared two identical documents, with word orders shifted, paragraphs moved and sentences inverted etc. I crazied the format up until mr copywriter was good and happy.

The output of the macro was identical results for both documents.

1171 unique words per document and the 18 keywords listed below occuring in exactly the same frequency order in both documents.

To have exact unique keyword volumes and identical counts on keywords between two 3854 word documents is statistically very unlikely. So without a single Search system to hand, it can be seen how easy it is to compare document duplication.

Count   Keyword

83         search

65         seo

55         company-name-removed

51         in

49         project

48         company-brand-removed

41         we

33         team

32         at

29         as

29         will

28         delivery

28         this

27         on

26         our

26         site

25         with

21         performance

The Macro Used: Thanks to Allen Wyatt’s Word Tips – Count Unique Word Occurrences

http://word.tips.net/Pages/T001833_Generating_a_Count_of_Word_Occurrences.html

Sub FindWords()
    Dim sResponse As String
    Dim iCount As Integer

    ‘ Input different words until the user clicks cancel
    Do
        ‘ Identify the word to count
        sResponse = InputBox( _
          Prompt:=”What word do you want to count?”, _
          Title:=”Count Words”, Default:=”")
   
        If sResponse > “” Then
            ‘ Set the counter to zero for each loop
            iCount = 0
            Application.ScreenUpdating = False
            With Selection
                .HomeKey Unit:=wdStory
                With .Find
                    .ClearFormatting
                    .Text = sResponse
                    ‘ Loop until Word can no longer
                    ‘ find the search string and
                    ‘ count each instance
                    Do While .Execute
                        iCount = iCount + 1
                        Selection.MoveRight
                    Loop
                End With
                ‘ show the number of occurences
                MsgBox sResponse & ” appears ” & iCount & ” times”
            End With
            Application.ScreenUpdating = True
        End If
    Loop While sResponse <> “”
End Sub
</pre><p>If you want to determine all the unique words in a document, along with how many times each of them appears in the document, then a different approach is needed. The following VBA macro will do just that.</p><pre>
Sub WordFrequency()
    Const maxwords = 9000          ‘Maximum unique words allowed
    Dim SingleWord As String       ‘Raw word pulled from doc
    Dim Words(maxwords) As String  ‘Array to hold unique words
    Dim Freq(maxwords) As Integer  ‘Frequency counter for unique words
    Dim WordNum As Integer         ‘Number of unique words
    Dim ByFreq As Boolean          ‘Flag for sorting order
    Dim ttlwds As Long             ‘Total words in the document
    Dim Excludes As String         ‘Words to be excluded
    Dim Found As Boolean           ‘Temporary flag
    Dim j, k, l, Temp As Integer   ‘Temporary variables
    Dim ans As String              ‘How user wants to sort results
    Dim tword As String            ‘

    ‘ Set up excluded words
    Excludes = “[the][a][of][is][to][for][by][be][and][are]“

    ‘ Find out how to sort
    ByFreq = True
    ans = InputBox(“Sort by WORD or by FREQ?”, “Sort order”, “WORD”)
    If ans = “” Then End
    If UCase(ans) = “WORD” Then
        ByFreq = False
    End If
   
    Selection.HomeKey Unit:=wdStory
    System.Cursor = wdCursorWait
    WordNum = 0
    ttlwds = ActiveDocument.Words.Count

    ‘ Control the repeat
    For Each aword In ActiveDocument.Words
        SingleWord = Trim(LCase(aword))
        ‘Out of range?
        If SingleWord < “a” Or SingleWord > “z” Then
            SingleWord = “”
        End If
        ‘On exclude list?
        If InStr(Excludes, “[" & SingleWord & "]“) Then
            SingleWord = “”
        End If
        If Len(SingleWord) > 0 Then
            Found = False
            For j = 1 To WordNum
                If Words(j) = SingleWord Then
                    Freq(j) = Freq(j) + 1
                    Found = True
                    Exit For
                End If
            Next j
            If Not Found Then
                WordNum = WordNum + 1
                Words(WordNum) = SingleWord
                Freq(WordNum) = 1
            End If
            If WordNum > maxwords – 1 Then
                j = MsgBox(“Too many words.”, vbOKOnly)
                Exit For
            End If
        End If
        ttlwds = ttlwds – 1
        StatusBar = “Remaining: ” & ttlwds & “, Unique: ” & WordNum
    Next aword

    ‘ Now sort it into word order
    For j = 1 To WordNum – 1
        k = j
        For l = j + 1 To WordNum
            If (Not ByFreq And Words(l) < Words(k)) _
              Or (ByFreq And Freq(l) > Freq(k)) Then k = l
        Next l
        If k <> j Then
            tword = Words(j)
            Words(j) = Words(k)
            Words(k) = tword
            Temp = Freq(j)
            Freq(j) = Freq(k)
            Freq(k) = Temp
        End If
        StatusBar = “Sorting: ” & WordNum – j
    Next j

    ‘ Now write out the results
    tmpName = ActiveDocument.AttachedTemplate.FullName
    Documents.Add Template:=tmpName, NewTemplate:=False
    Selection.ParagraphFormat.TabStops.ClearAll
    With Selection
        For j = 1 To WordNum
            .TypeText Text:=Trim(Str(Freq(j))) _
              & vbTab & Words(j) & vbCrLf
        Next j
    End With
    System.Cursor = wdCursorNormal
    j = MsgBox(“There were ” & Trim(Str(WordNum)) & _
      ” different words “, vbOKOnly, “Finished”)
End Sub

Vistors to the site will notice some handy search term examples towards the bottom of the homepage.

Powerset SEO A Bridge too far?

But click that grey more button and you’ll find Powerset have stuffed 266 search links on the the page below the fold, with all but 8 links largely hidden from most users.

A quick search for some of these terms shows ther perform well on Google, such as “who did Google Aquire” (ranked 2nd), “when was Harvard University Founded” (ranked 5th) and “who owns the Philadelphia Eagles” (ranked 1st).

Passers by could be mistaken for thinking this is keyword / link stuffing and not legitimate behaviour from a search engine. The jury is out I guess, but I thought you may like a partial glimpse of the handy search assistance lists should they, shock horror, decide to withdraw such extensive helpfullness from the Powerset home page anytime soon.

Search Engine Market Share is dominated by Google at a global level, but there are markets where Google’s presence is less dominant. My team is working on compiling a comprehensive and up to date Search Engine Market Share document but in the meantime the following handy reference was sourced and slightly modified from http://www.luna-park.de/home/internet-fakten/suchmaschinen-marktanteile.html and http://www.cre8asiteforums.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=64322 (Thanks). The German version was sourced, the English version was not sourced so I’ve added sourcing to the UK version.

Search engine market share in Germany
www.google.de – 89.20%
www.yahoo.de – 3.50%
www.t-online.de – 2.20%
www.aol.de – 1.20%
http://search.msn.de – 1.10%
Andere Other – 2.70%
Source: www.webhits.de Date: November 2007

UK Search engine market shares in the UK
www.google.co.uk – 70.25%
www.google.com – 14.95%
www.uk.ask.com – 3.55%
http://uk.search.yahoo.com -3.52%

Source: www.hitwise.co.uk Date: September 2007

Bulgarian Search engine market share in Bulgaria
www.google.bg – 90.00%
www.live.bg – 5.00%
Yahoo – 5.00%
www.jabse.com – .50%

Source: www.multilingual-search.com Date: 2007

Search engine market shares in the Czech Republic
www.seznam.cz – 62.53%
Google – 24.75%
www.centrum.cz – 4.84%
www.atlas.cz – 2.58%
www.jyxo.cz – 0.42%
Source: www.netmonitor.cz    www.navrcholu.cz Date: 2007

Search engine market share in Denmark
www.google.dk – 80%
www.jubii.dk – 7%
www.msn.dk – 5%
www.eniro.dk – 5%
Andere Other – 3%

Source: www.business.dk Date: 2007

Search engine market share in France
www.google.fr – 89.79%
www.yahoo.fr – 3.14%
http://fr.msn.com – 2.48%
www.orange.fr -1.89%
www.free.fr – 0,72%

Source: www.xitimonitor.com Date: July 2007

Search engine market share in the U.S.
www.google.com – 57.00%
www.yahoo.com – 23.70%
www.live.com – 10.30%
www.ask.com – 4.70%
www.aol.com – 4.30%
Source: www.comscore.com Date: October 2007

China Search engine market shares in China
www.baidu.cn – 69.50%
www.google.cn – 23%
www.yahoo.cn – 2.30%
www.sohu.cn – 1.80%
Andere Other – 3.40%
Source: China IntelliConsulting Corporation Date: September 2007

Search engine market share in Australia
www.google.com – 56.30%
www.yahoo.com – 21.50%
www.live.com – 8.40%
www.aol.com – 5.30%
www.ask.com – 2.00%

Source: www.hitwise.com.au Date: June 2007 

Search engine market share in Netherlands
www.google.nl – 95%
www.ilse.nl – 2%
www.live.nl – 1%
Source: www.checkit.nl Date: September 2007

Search engine market share in Portugal
www.google.pt – 90%
www.sapo.pt – 7%
www.clix.pt – 2%
www.iol.pt – 1%

Source: http://netpanel.marktest.pt  Date: 2007

Search engine market share in Russia
www.yandex.ru – 56.70%
www.rambler.ru – 16.80%
www.google.ru – 14.10%
http://search.mail.ru – 7.50%
www.live.com – 1.20%

Source: www.liveinternet.ru Date: August 2007

Search engine market share in Slovakia
www.google.sk – 75.60%
www.zoznam.sk -13.10%
www.zoohoo.sk – 4.90%
www.atlas.sk – 3.70%
www.azet.sk – 0.70%
Source: http://www.mediaresearch.sk/, www.aimsr.sk Date:2007

Search engine market share in South Korea
www.naver.com – 72.70%
www.daum.net – 11.50%
http://kr.yahoo.com – 6.20%

Source: http://www.koreanclick.com/, http://inews.mk.co.kr/ Date: 2007

Search engine market share in Spain
www.google.es – 7.70%
www.yahoo.es – 17.40%
www.msn.es – 5.20%
www.terra.es – 4%

Source: http://www.aimc.es/ Date: 2007

Search engine market share in Iceland
www.google.is – 51%
www.leit.is – 42%
www.embla.is – 2%
www.finna.is – 1%
Andere Other – 4%
Source: http://www.statice.is/ Date: 2007

Search engine market share in Israel
www.google.co.il – 90%
www.walla.co.il – 11%
www.msn.co.il – 5%
www.tapuz.co.il – 2%

Source: http://www.searchmarketing.co.il/ Date: January 2007

Search engine market share in Estonia
www.neti.ee – 75%
www.google.com/intl/et – 20%
www.delfi.ee – 12%
http://raha.www.ee – 2%
Alltheweb, Altavista & others – 2%
Source: www.multilingual-search.com Date: 2007

Search engine market share in Italy
www.google.it – 59.01%
www.msn.it – 25.10%
http://search.alice.it (virgilio) – 23.30%
http://arianna.libero.it – 16.80%
Source: http://www.gplorusso.it/ Date: 2005

Search engine market share in Ukraine
www.google.com/intl/uk – 51.30%
www.yandex.ru -1.50%
www.rambler.ru – 8.70%
www.meta.ua – 2.80%
www.mail.ru – 2.60%
Source: http://index.bigmir.net/se,, Kiev International Sociological Institute Date: 2007

Toureg is a misspelling of the 4×4 VW Touareg brand. As a general rule, misspellings account for around 10% of the search traffic for hard to spell brand names. This is an open door for SEO and PPC sharks.

If we look at Toureg  on Google’s keyword tool we see that 8100 searches for the misspelling against 74,000 searches for Touareg.  This is a 10.94% misspelling factor. Various other misspellings make up around 2% more traffic around the brand name. 

While the volume of misspelling traffic is decreasing as search engines suggest corrections, or occasionally auto correct the search term there is still plenty of meat for search activities that target misspellings of popular terms.

Brand owners should be aware and budget for the extra costs that will be incurred by defending hard to spell products, for example the estimated CPC of Toureg  is 0.94 pence, over twice the cost of the CPC (0.45 pence) of the correctly spelt Touareg.

Below is the Top 20 SEO Keywords by price (In GBP) from Google Keyword Tool, based on English Language run against all countries. Of the Top 20 by price, only two were in Top 20 by search volumes. The term “SEO firms” is popular in the US, with “SEO Companies” popular in both UK and US.

FYI – Raw data from Google above,  I usually discount Google search volumes by at least 75% to remove network and duplication (My pinch of salt).