I have been promising Rand all week that, yes, I'd write a post. And then we'd go drinking again. Nevertheless, with Rand on a plane, I thought it was time to get my act together and write something up. Following Rebecca's post about Get Listed, it seemed like a good time to write up something about an issue we at Distilled have been having with Google Local. Rand and I were talking about this after the session on universal search at SES in London that he wrote up the other day.

In a nutshell, the issue arises when you have a business operating in multiple languages. Consider, for example, a hotel chain (let's use the example "Will's Hotel Chain"). Imagine I have:

• UK website at willshotel.co.uk
• French website at willshotel.fr
• Spanish website at willshotel.es

[This whole thing is independent of my domain name strategy - the same issue arises if I have willshotel.com/uk, willshotel.com/fr and willshotel.com/es].

Now, imagine that as a result of some savvy property deals I own hotels in London, Paris and Madrid - so I have:

English pages:

• willshotel.co.uk/london
• willshotel.co.uk/paris
• willshotel.co.uk/madrid

French pages:

• willshotel.fr/londres
• willshotel.fr/paris
• willshotel.fr/madrid

Spanish pages:

• willshotel.es/londres
• willshotel.es/paris
• willshotel.es/madrid

Now - because they have a physical location in those three cities, there is no problem with registering three times - and it might make most sense for me to register:

• willshotel.co.uk/london
• willshotel.fr/paris
• willshotel.es/madrid

...so that when someone searches for me in each region, they can find my local listing and it seems to make sense for each region to be listed in its local language. The problem is that many people wanting to stay in a hotel in Madrid are English, searching from the UK and looking for a page in English about a Spanish hotel. So I really want to register multiple URLs for each geographic location - one in each language, but there is no technical way to list a URL per language. In the absence of that, the only way of achieving the same result is to register each of the 9 pages listed above - each language for each location, but the current guidelines say:

Don't participate in any behavior with the intention or result of listing your business more times than it exists.

Now this does have the result of listing the business more times than it exists and is therefore currently against the guidelines.

But it seems like the goal is perfectly legitimate so it would be great to have a way to do this. I'd love to hear anyone's thoughts on how this should be done.

I think the waters are muddied a little by the number of times you see crazy local search results at the moment - see this search that I see at the moment in Google for odeon greenwich (Odeon is a UK cinema chain):

I want to know how to do that!