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caz craig said:

David, Australian and British English is the same- we have left it in its original state :) After living in the US for four years, I'm kinda confused now to how to spell words, which punctuation to use and which side of the road to drive on. Only one of those really bothers me :)

 

I mix up the spelling on my blog so I can hit both US and rest of the world, but really US is where I get most of my traffic so I concentrate on that and will have to take the "You're a traitor" comments I receive. 

 

Thanks Mike, once again for being so informative. I think I understand more but the Google haze still lingers.

I'll say this Caz.  Everyone in the US spells 'traveler' and 'traveling' correctly.  Everyone else spells it wrong!  Consider we all blog about travel, that seemed like a good word to focus on for our spelling differences! 

LOL.

I can transcribe the "French accent in English" for French readers very well, but it was my first attempt at doing so for English readers. :-)

My actual spoken English does have a French accent, but it's not as bad as the typical Frenchman (yes, I do pronounce "h" and "th" properly, I just have problems with tonic accents). 

@Caz Craig: LOL for the "traitor". Yeah, some people just can't deal with foreign languages (or even foreign stuff). I have been accused several times by French people of showing off because my spoken English is somewhat decent and "Hi dontuh speekah likeuh zissuh".

@Mike: you describe exactly what happened to my French blog in February. Remember my freak out? (it coincided with the Panda thing). Site still indexed but not appearing anywhere in search results. Lasted two weeks and now, it's doing much better than it used to do.

David, Australian and British English is the same- we have left it in its original state :) After living in the US for four years, I'm kinda confused now to how to spell words, which punctuation to use and which side of the road to drive on. Only one of those really bothers me :)

I mix up the spelling on my blog so I can hit both US and rest of the world, but really US is where I get most of my traffic so I concentrate on that and will have to take the "You're a traitor" comments I receive. 

Thanks Mike, once again for being so informative. I think I understand more but the Google haze still lingers.

@ David. At first it may seem like you are limited with setting your region and not being able to set to multiple regions such as French speaking countries. 

Actually it is the other way around. Setting the location is just a way to limit your "customers" so to speak.  By using a global setting you are just taking the limits off. French speaking countries will be able to find you easier than non-French speaking countries. The reason for that is the keywords you use. It is doubtful Australians will be doing a search for "oeufs à la vente", and more likely they will search for "eggs for sale" So it does not really matter if you only select French speaking countries.

Australian spelling will ultimately tell Google the site is geared to Oz and not US. No idea what mixing spellings would do, but I know that using dialects is part of the algorithm.

Custom search and the new browsers are a very good for Google to help weed out spam. By analyzing which sites you frequent, Google is able to make the search a little more fine tuned. It may make you lose a little traffic on one side but it will bring more traffic on the other. People that are looking for sites like yours will find it easier. 

I'm jumping in to add a few questions/topics about Google.

About Google "geographical area" is there a way to set it for several countries?

My English blog is not localized and I don't think I ever will localize it (I actually get a good share of traffic from Malaysia, who would have thought that? traffic I may have not gotten had I localized it).

But my French blog is localized in France by default (being a .fr). It's alright in a certain sense, most of my readership is from France, but isn't it a problem for searches from other French speaking countries (not mentioning Japan, as the blog also targets French speakers in Japan, either expats or Japanese people who can read French).

Is there a way to localize your blog to several countries? 

I always found it strange from Google to reduce things to only one country like that, the web being worldwide and all.

Second question/comment (it's really more of a comment).

Google searches are more and more personalized. When googling something from Chrome (my default browser, linked to my main google account) or from Rockmelt (Chromium-based new browser, google is localized in France for this one, regardless of the language I use) or Firefox (google is not localized nor linked to a specific account on this one) I get completely different results for the same keywords.

I see why, but what does it entail for SEO. Let's say you manage to get to page 1 on that cherished keyword, but then, because google will give personalized results to more and more people, how do you deal with that?

There are really two main things to consider. First is whether or not your site is a global site or directed towards a specific area. Obviously yours is global so you want to make sure that your Webmaster Tools Settings in Google are not set to a certain geographical area.

The next thing to look at is your overall blog. If your blog holds a lot of weight in Australia due to a lot of information about Australia then you may rank much better there then in other parts of the world. You cannot really look at it as though you rank well for one place and not another, you just have to look at where you are not ranking well and concentrate on that. 

Continuing to build links will improve your rankings across the board. Another way to build location specific ranking is to create inner links. By adding a single link to another page that is location specific you will kind of tie it all together for the search engines and build more domain authority for that location.

There is a third factor that is usually very temporary and that is that Google uses several data centers. While you may get position one in the US for a keyword it can take up to 12 weeks for it to hit the UK. Oddly enough the UK is very slow.