Following yesterdays update on French search engine marketing we turn our attention to the latest SEO and PPC news from Germany.
German SEO Survey
The results of a survey of German SEOs at a recent search marketing conference in Munich:
- The majority of SEOs have an undeserved bad reputation (36%)
- The negative image is strictly the SEOs fault (33%)
- Most SEOs dont care about good content (32%)
- Without SEOs search results would be worse (32%)
- The bad image of SEO is also the search engines fault (30%)
- Only a small number of SEOs are spammers (27%)
- SEO is being recommended by well known search engine operators (27%)
- SEOs have a deserved bad reputation (27%)
- Without SEOs the search engine results would be better (25%)
- Most SEOs are spammers (25%)
- Only a few SEOs dont care about good content (24%)
- SEO is being fought by well known search engines (21%)
Author Rank
Author-Rank.org should help webmasters identify an authorative author on a specific topic. This can be used to both contact an author and widen ones social network.
Search Engines Market Share
Google is leading the way with 90.3% of the market share, with Conduit and Bing the next largest at 3.5 and 2.5% respectively. Bing is growing the fastest, enjoying a 0.2% increase in market share, double that of Google and Yahoo who were the only other search engines to expand their audience, at a rate of 0.1%.
Ecommerce Law in Germany
There have been changes in the German ecommerce Law. The €40 clausula refers to paying the postage of products that were purchased online and then sent back. The online shop has to pay the postage for sending them back if the product costs €40 or more. The cost can’t be spread between different products, the value of one product must be €40 or more.
The German Parliament is working on a uniform European sale of goods law for international online-shops to have a uniform law one day.
The Introduction of the SEPA
The Payment congress is taking place in mid-May to discuss (amongst others) the introduction of the SEPA (Single Euro Payments Area) – implementation by February 2014. The implementation will include a new EU-wide payment option.
Summary Tool and Courier Service
Start-up ‘tldr’ has introduced a tool to summarise texts online to 800 characters. This will allow readers to prioritise their reading and to see at one glance if an article is of interest.
Another start-up ‘Tiramizoo’ is the first courier-service agency with same-day-delivery in Germany. So far they deliver to 15 cities in Germany, mainly with goods from online shops during the festive seasons.
German Blog Charts
German blog charts have been launched after a 12-month break. Jens Schrader, a ‘pop-culture junkie’ reintroduced them. Major ranking factors are social interaction, comments and content.
Another useful website is https://www.10000flies.de/ which shows what topics and sites are popular in the German Market at a particular time.
Mobile Recruiting
A mobile recruiting survey that looked at career websites to see if they were optimised for smartphone or tablet use showed that only 7% are optimised for mobile use.
Google Image Search
The new Google image search that has been rolled out across the UK and a number of other countries, where high resolution images are shown directly in the SERPs with the hosts website no longer in the background, is yet to be introduced to google.de (except for smartphones). This has not been well received, prompting protests and a media backlash.
Now you’re up-to-date with Germany why not check out the latest SEO and PPC happenings from France , Italy and Spain…
Insights
