Today’s Webmaster Help video from Google is an interesting one. It’s essentially Matt Cutts saying that Google does not hate Albania, after a user asks if this is the case.
More specifically, the question asked why Google doesn’t support Albania for some of its services, like advanced search, AdSense, Google News, etc.
The question of whether or not Google hates Albania generated a “pretty funny” discussion thread internally at Google, according to Cutts.
“I pinged a few people, and I sort of abridged the question to: ‘Does Google hate Albania?’ And so there were comments on the internal doc, like, ‘No! We don’t hate Albania, and the follow-up guy said, ‘No! We love Albania, period!'” recalls Cutts. “That said, there’s still some room for improvement. So, we did launch Google.al earlier in 2013, and in fact, I think we had a Google doodle for the 100th independence day late last year, in 2012, so we are working on it. We’re trying to get better support for Albania, but even though Google’s won a lot of prizes for having the most internationalized website in the world, there’s still a lot of work that we need to go through to be able to make sure that we provide support for language in all kinds of areas.”
“It’s not a deliberate slight. It’s not that we don’t like Albania. We like Albania a lot. It’s just, it takes time to be able to be able to support properties properly, and give those languages all the support that they deserve.”
Cutts says he’s going to use the question to push some guilt trips around Google, and push harder for Albanian support.