Yesterday I started to see news regarding Google regarding the activation of its first specific generic domain .CAT.
According to the Fundació puntCAT, which manages the ‘.cat’ domain.
“The activation of google.cat represents a further step in the recognition of the Catalan culture and language throughout the world”, according to the director of the Fundació puntCAT, Jordi Iparraguirre.
What is the PuntCat Foundation?
La is a private, non-profit organization with no political affiliation, founded on December 28, 2005 and is the heir to the now-defunct PuntCAT Association, whose objective is to administer the ‘.cat’ domain, and help develop the Society of Information Catalan-speaking information.
Why is it important to NetDebugger?
Catalan is the most deeply rooted language and culture in my daily life. I am proud to see how the .cat domain was the first that Google decided to activate.
Let’s see their techniques.
Now when we enter the default interface, the interface of the language we were using until now opens, but from this link we can see how all the texts appear translated into Catalan.
This feature is not new since for a long time we could see the messages and buttons according to the interface we wanted from the “” link that we see on the right of the search engine.
Another faster way was by modifying the URL that we see in a search. We just have to look for the parameter “hl=es” and change it to the initials of the language that interests us; in this case with “hl=ca” we see the interface in Catalan, “hl=en” in English…
More about the .CAT domain.
Checking information about the Google.cat domain, we see that the registration date was February 14, 2006 and it expires in 2008.
This means that 1 and a half years ago this domain was registered on the Internet but until yesterday we could not see it from our browser.
What does it mean for SEO?
Although Google’s software is constantly under development and in some cases it is shown as a service in a “beta” phase, there are many variables that determine the position of a keyword in its results, for example the search engine algorithm or the quality of the pages your “google bot” spider finds.
From my modest position, I believe that Google would like all of its users to start learning how to search for information, using its interface tools.
In this way, and in a few years, when I observed that we have acquired enough skills, I could further segment these results according to the language in which the content was written, the domain of the search engine where we carried out the search, and the country where the pages are hosted. In short, there would only be the .COM domain where the results would depend on all the technical factors that SEOs follow every day.
Let’s see a practical case.
We can look for any word but there are some that are typical of some countries, example: “regio” is a proper word in Argentina that means “perfect”, “correfoc” known in Catalonia, its translation into Spanish would be “correfuego”, and “obrigado”. ” means “thank you” in Portuguese.
But in this test I have used a proper name “Jordi Camps”, a term where we found more than two million results from any possible language in which content was written.
Use your Google account to view this and see how:
The position of the pages and the number of results vary according to the domain Google.com, Google.es and Google.cat, and the interface of the results “hl=en, hl=es, hl=ca”.
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