Obviously being a big Liverpool fan, I can’t say I was hugely disappointed to see Alex Ferguson leave Manchester United. After all they have been the bane of my life football wise for as far back as I can remember. On the counter side, I received an interesting infographic from the folk over at Talksport with some of the stats relating to the news breaking back on Wednesday of the departure of Sir Alex from the Red site of Manchester
Obviously Talksport were one of the first radio stations to announce the departure of Sir Alex, with social media being a significant outlet for the Talksport Media team. As such they were able to capture that data and produce a nice breakdown of what sort of impact being first to break these kinds of stories can have on normal social media trends. Of particular note were the following
- Twitter Mentions Up 495%
- 98,000 clicks from Facebook and Twitter alone to their website
- 376% increase in site impressions
The amplification of their traditional media would have no doubt helped this – but its still a considerable increase on their normal volumes of social media traction.
Very interested to read this morning that Google have announced that the HREFLANG framework has been expanded to include a fallback default in situations which is supported by both Google and Yandex.
If we take the following example
- sitex.com – Default Country Selector page
- sitex.com/gb/en – For users in the UK speaking English
- sitex.com/us/en – For users in the USA speaking English
- sitex.com/za/en – For users in South Africa speaking English
- sitex.com/fr/fr – For users in France speaking French
- sitex/com/ch/fr – For users in Switzerland speaking French
- sitex.com/be/fr – For users in Belgium speaking French
As highlighted above a number of different sites exist to cater for local markets. With sites falling outside of these markets, conculsions are left to Google, which if we are completely honest can be a dangerous thing to do as Google doesnt necessarily always interpret things correctly
From today this is changing.
The new x-default hreflang attribute value signals to the search engine algorithms that the specified page doesn’t target any specific language or locale and is the default page when no other page is better suited. In context this would be implemented as follows
<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://sitex.com/gb/en” hreflang=”en-gb” />
<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://sitex.com/us/en” hreflang=”en-us” />
<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://sitex.com/za/en” hreflang=”en-au” />
<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://sitex.com/fr/fr” hreflang=”fr-fr” />
<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://sitex.com/ch/fr” hreflang=”ch-fr” />
<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://sitex.com/be/fr” hreflang=”be-fr” />
<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://sitex.com/” hreflang=”x-default” />
This certainly to me is a fantastic addition to something I have found to be a useful support for global campaigns, which have become increasingly complex in the current Google Landscape.
