I have realized that there is not comprehensive information about online marketing worldwide in English or any other language(any other language I can read ) and the information found is scattered around the web without any consistency. There are a few respectable exceptions like the excellent Global search report, the blog Spanish SEO or this forum itself but that is about it.

My suggestion is for every member of the forum working in Online Marketing in a country that is not USA or UK to answer this set of questions in this post. This way we can all combine our respective knowledge and create an interesting source of information. Feel free to add any other questions you might think I am neglecting and above all, reply!!!

My questions:

1. What are the main search engines in your country? And what browsers are the most popular in it?
2. What are the main paid search platforms in your country?
3. What do you think are the most effective SEO techniques for your market/country and why? (on page optimization, link building, social media optimization, etc)
4. What techniques do you use for link building in your country? Are directories submissions feasible? Link sourcing? Is reciprocal linking still contemplated by webmasters?
5. What website analytics you think is more popular in your country and why? Is web analytics consultancy something your clients find valuable?
6. What are the main search engines in your country? And what browsers are the most popular in it?
7. What are the biggest sites for social media in your country (social networking, social bookmarking, news sites, etc)?
8. Do you know studies or information about algorithmic differences in your country/language main search engines?
   
   

Any information would be fantastic.

Hi Oskar,

Thanks a lot for your kind comments and the link to Spanish SEO. Much appreciated.

I find your questions really interesting and enlightening. I'd be happy to contribute with what I know about the markets I work with. Nonetheless, since the questions are pretty inclusive and extensive, perhaps we can divide them into regions and/or groups so that we can address each one of them separately.

Regards,

Augusto

Internet penetration seems to have increased slightly from 2007 to a 43% still far from other European countries. There is not updated official data coming from the AIMC about Search Engines Share Market but comparative data seems to give a prominent first position to Google.es (95 to 97%), followed by MSN and Yahoo with marginal percentages.


Myspace seems to have the biggest share market with 34% in terms of a social media platform but it is followed closely by facebook, hi.com and sonico.com. Tuenti.com is a special animal; it is Spanish specific social media network that has got a big buzz lately, despite being around since 2006 and now has more visitors than facebook and posseses a very high level of participation. You can see from Google Trends the popularity of the site in terms of traffic:

Google Trends for Websites: tuenti.com, facebook.com, hi5.com, sonico.com

Spanish equivalent of Digg, social news site, is Meneame.net , very popular.

As expected in a country as stingy as mine , Google analytics is the tool more utilized, with a staggering share market of 75%. 50% of all companies don't use any web analytics tool, they don't have anyone dedicated to Web Analytics and only the few companies that use a paid analytics tool hire anyone to manage it. Source: Segunda Encuesta del Estado de la AnalÃ*tica Web en España | WebAnalytics.ES.

A lot to improve for us on that matter.

Since Google has such a huge share market in Spain I will talk about the algorithmic differences with Google.com and Google.es but I think this could be extrapolated to any country specific Google domain.

It has been largely debated that TrustRank has less impact in country specific Google versions than in Google.com. That means that newly created sites would have more probabilities to rank well in country specific Googles than in Google.com.

Keyword rich domains seem to have a bigger impact on international versions of Google than in Google.com.

Obviously, country specific local domains (.es) are prioritized in SERPs from Google country specific version in detriment of .com.

Spam filters work much worse in other languages Google versions than in Google. You can get away with more dodgy stuff internationally, not that I would recommend it.

I think Google is increasingly investing on mastering the nuances of different languages so its algorithm can serve the best results to a wider international non english speaker audience. However, I think that stemming algorithms, and I also have the experience to prove this of course, don't work so well in romanic languages. As a result I believe that exact phrase match within content might have more weight in country specific Googles than in .com.

Actually, whenever I do kw research for a new site, I do it in English, French and German...and....the German & French SERPs look like they're "cluttered" with authoritative domains...that have pages rank simply, because they're on an authoritative domain....which usually makes me prefer the English-language market!

Are you sure it's easier to rank in google.tld as opposed to google.com ? from my (admittedly limited) experience it seems the other way around?

Other say its good to rank locally first before campaigning in google.com. And I think it make sense.

Just thought you needed to hear this.

Everything will depend on the sector/niche and how competitive. French and German online markets are slightly more mature than Spain but the same principles I mention apply. It is just common sense really, the competition is less fierce in terms of websites that are correctly optimised, and techniques that are very consolidated in the anglo-saxon country are in their infancy in other markets.

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thanks, thought
dk