10 ms·

Google Maps Mania Blog is Dropping Google Maps

269 points by chippy 12y ago

chippy 12y ago
From the post: "Tomorrow I'm going to feature the very last Google Maps on Google Maps Mania, The blog now gets 10% of the Google search traffic it did just 18 months ago. With Google attempting to kill off Google Maps Mania it would be like a turkey voting for Christmas for me to continue to promote Google Maps and the Google Maps API. Last week I came very close to giving up completely. But despite Google I still think there is an audience for the blog. So from Wednesday Google Maps Mania will be featuring maps created with Open Street Map, Map Box, Leaflet and other map providers. If you have any Google Maps you want promoting you have about 24 hours left to submit them to Google Maps Mania." ---- The blog is at: http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.co.uk/ http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.co.uk/
- Vik1ng 12y ago
  normal g+ post: https://plus.google.com/100293158896126941899/posts/T7huGEQ7AG3 https://plus.google.com/100293158896126941899/posts/T7huGEQ7...
- dfc 12y ago
  I am curious why you pasted the entire content of the linked page as a comment. Is plus.google.com frequently blocked and/or unreachable?
  - chippy 12y ago
    I was unsure of the visibility of the page and unsure if the page could be deleted or edited before we had time to discuss it. It was also just a paragraph of text.
  - silverbax88 12y ago
    Yes, Google+ is usually blocked on corporate networks. Which is really no big loss.
    - thrownaway2424 12y ago
      I think you used the word "usually" to mean "in my narrow and by no means representative experience."
      - silverbax88 12y ago
        I mean blocked on most major networks by Barracuda and WebSense by default. So, I'll stick with my original statement, thanks.
        Karunamon 12y ago
        I think they were more referring to the snarky "no great loss" comment..
rpedela 12y ago
How is Google trying to kill off Google Maps Mania?
- kitbrennan 12y ago
  From the comments: Google searches 'Panda' updates. More info on Panda here - http://searchengineland.com/metafilter-penalized-google-192168 http://searchengineland.com/metafilter-penalized-google-1921...
- ChuckMcM 12y ago
  The scourge of low quality content has Google putting more and more pest control into their algorithm. That has started killing off the traffic to actual quality sites.
  - wcfields 12y ago
    Most notably, it's really taken a hard hit to MetaFilter[1]; the site had been funded by a $5 fee to join (post/comment) and Google Adwords on AskMetaFilter[2]. Now they've had to lay off several moderators which contributed to the sites high quality. [1] http://metafilter.com http://metafilter.com [2] http://ask.metafilter.com http://ask.metafilter.com
brokentone 12y ago
While this makes a certain amount of sense (not promoting a tool from a company that is not promoting your content as well in another arena), I'm actually glad that Google works in a blanket manner rather than an individual manner. Assessing "manual" promotions of domains could get really sticky really quickly.
- jrochkind1 12y ago
  What makes you confident that Google doesn't manually adjust weighting and ranking for individual sites? I've always suspected they might -- both increasing and decreasing ranking -- although they won't want this to be well-known for legal and other reasons. The legal reasons _might_ be enough to keep them from doing it at all, it's true, but I've always suspected they do it anyway. I mean, we know they do it to penalize certain sites they believe violated their ad rules, right? So we know their systems at least possess the technical ability to manually penalize sites. But I'm not an expert in this stuff, which is why I start with a question (it wasn't rhetorical!).
  - morgante 12y ago
    Google does engage in manual actions, but such actions are always reported in webmaster tools.
fidotron 12y ago
I seriously thought from the title "That must be because they've come to hate new Google Maps so much" and was surprised that wasn't the underlying reason. To be honest, I've always been dubious of any business that is familiar enough with Google's search versions that they name them. It's indicative of being way too dependent on a single entity.
- ssharp 12y ago
  It's not necessarily indicative of being "dependent" on Google organic traffic. Even if organic search drives just 10% of your revenue, that 10% may still be big enough to warrant plenty of attention on the organic search channel. Enough to warrant paying attention to algorithm changes and versions. I'll never disagree with the idea that you should diversify your marketing and not become dependent on a single channel, especially a channel you cannot control, but to ignore or neglect that channel when it actually matters is not a better or noble solution. So far in my experience with the new Panda update is that it's actually correcting some sites it probably shouldn't have previously penalized in other Panda iterations.
- billmalarky 12y ago
  Publishers are extremely dependent on Google. Traffic referred from Google has a much higher ad CPM than direct traffic. Mainly because transient traffic is much more likely to click on an ad to go elsewhere than your actual users.
- mathattack 12y ago
  It seems like a blog specifically about one company would by definition be dependent on it, no?
themodelplumber 12y ago
I'm sure the Maps team will be excited to hear about this. On the other hand I wonder what kind of sites this website is competing with. I don't think the site is really best suited to the blog format; maybe it'd be a good idea to rethink the presentation and throw some of the latest SEO strategy in there as well. You can't just make a blog these days and do ordinary blog things and expect to collect the same SERP pension every year.
Pxtl 12y ago
I'm starting to wonder if killing the "content farms" like About and Answers and the like aren't a case where the cure is worse than the disease. Often when you search for a "how do I" question, the content farms are the only things that produce a result that's even vaguely topical, at least before Pandas. I mean, it usually went content farms -> Pure SEO spam -> actual relevant results. Content farms weren't good, but they still beat the SEO spammers. At least the content farms had some minimal connection to the topic, unlike say eBay.
- thetrb 12y ago
  I actually liked sites like eHow, but I'm probably in the minority here. If I wanted a quick answer for a question these sites were providing a good, quick answer. They are not going into a lot of depth, of course, but if I want that then I just use a bit more specific search terms.
  - EGreg 12y ago
    So now I am supposed to search on eHow directly? Oh noes.
    - xionon 12y ago
      I think the point is that there are multiple sites like eHow, and searching each of them individually and then deciding which results were the best is sub-optimal. Plus, it prevents the serendipitous discovery of new sites like eHow. If only there were a way to search multiple content farm sites at once, and rank those results according to how useful they were...
      - EGreg 12y ago
        Google already does this, by its measure of "useful" (to you). If you don't like it, you can search those sites directly. For example search for "ehow:how to ask a girl out" was that so hard?
        12y ago
EGreg 12y ago
And this is why you shouldn't rely on Google for your traffic, but diversify off of it asap. In fact dont rely on any one company. Use the open web.
- todd3834 12y ago
  Could you give some examples of alternative ways to get Google quality traffic that fall under "the open web"?
  - TheMagicHorsey 12y ago
    Exactly. I want to be edified as well. I have not found another way to get organic traffic.
    - EGreg 12y ago
      Develop content that people would share with one another, and find on other sites. Videos - develop videos that drive "traffic" to your website ... Vimeo YouTube 5min or your own site Blogs - have people in your company start writing blogs and sharing their expertise on the web, and others will naturally want to check out your products ... LinkedIn Blogger or your own site PR - have people cultivate relationships in forums and with publications and post stuff that your bloggers write there are many ways to get traffic besides relying on one search engine and by the way, even ON that search engine, you should be creating all kinds of things to "take over" the first page, if you are really trying to vie for traffic e.g. on GOOGLE: youtube videos will show up if you make them google+ profiles will show up if you make them local listings, images, maps, bla bla bla which means Google is telling you to upload a lot of content to GOOGLE owned properties in order to promote your site so if you really want google traffic that badly you should do it!
      - Vik1ng 12y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_search https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_search So what you say might answer the first question, but not the follow up one. Well, your "e.g. on GOOGLE:" answers it, but the fact that you use google for that example already shows that there really isn't any way around that. He wasn't asking how to improve ranking. He was asking for alternatives to google search traffic. (Unless I got that wrong)
uptown 12y ago
OT, but does anyone else have wild zooming issues with the "new" Google Maps on OS X with a scroll-wheel mouse? It borders on unusable as the zoom seems to completely have a mind of its own. Edit: This seems to be the issue I'm experiencing: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/maps/6D072fsK93E%5B176-200-false%5D https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/maps/6D072fsK...
- LeoPanthera 12y ago
  I have that issue too. It seems to depend on the mouse. It doesn't happen with my Logitech mouse as long as I set the wheel to "clicky" mode.
- morbius 12y ago
  If you have a mouse with detents, there seems to be no problem.
jacquesm 12y ago
Any kind of algorithmic classifier will have false positives for a given level of confidence. The lower the threshold at which you start banning sites the more false positives you will have, there is no silver bullet here. So when Google decided to crack down on a class of sites sites that share enough traits with the sites that were being axed came into the danger zone and a number of those ended up being penalized enough that they are no longer viable / interesting enough to maintain. This appears to be one of those cases. Being dependent on a single entity your hosting, for the traffic you are receiving as well as the service you are directly promoting (in this case maps) makes you an add-on to their eco-system. I wonder how many small but viable websites are still in this position and how many of them will give up after finding their traffic decimated because they ended up being a false positive in some filter. It might be more productive to try to figure out what exactly caused the penalty, but I fully understand if the owner of the site just wants to move on and become as independent of this as he can. Let's hope that 'pointing go google maps' versus 'pointing to open streetmaps' won't trigger another penalty because then he might lose what is still there or a good sized fraction of that.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
mbrubeck 12y ago
What gets me is that Google employees like JohnMu (in the following thread) are actually telling authors to hide large portions of their sites from Google's indexer, in order to prevent all their pages from receiving penalties for "low-quality" content: https://productforums.google.com/forum/m/?hl=en#!mydiscussions/webmasters/T-4i0yB7CrQ https://productforums.google.com/forum/m/?hl=en#!mydiscussio... That feels like a step back from Google's stated mission to "to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful": http://www.google.com/about/company/ http://www.google.com/about/company/ Apparently, only the information that maximizes search advertising revenue is worth organizing and making accessible. I understand that fighting SEO spam is an important part of keeping search usable, but there must be a way to do it that doesn't lead to completely cutting out large parts of the "indie" web (e.g. posts in discussion forums, and other sites that host user-generated content).
- valarauca1 12y ago
  Wait you mean a for profit company's goal is to maximize profit? We need to stop pretending Google is a rich Mozilla, They're a poor Microsoft.
  - ambler0 12y ago
    By what measure is Google poorer than Microsoft? They have less free cash flow, but a greater market cap. http://ycharts.com/companies/MSFT http://ycharts.com/companies/MSFT http://ycharts.com/companies/GOOG http://ycharts.com/companies/GOOG
    - joshjdr 12y ago
      I think you nailed it there. Market cap is valuation and subject to change on a whim [edit- specifically, it's a measure of sentiment; it's a prediction of future cash flows] . Free cash flow is probably a more accurate measurement of the "poor" vs. "rich" concept. Let's be honest though- both companies are filthy rich.
    - silverbax88 12y ago
dfc 12y ago
Turkey voting for christmas That was a new phrase for me. It seems to be chiefly British but the Wikipedia page suggest that the American alternative is "turkey voting for thanksgiving." I searched google ngrams for "turkey[s] voting for christmas|thanksgiving" and it seems that the British variant is a relatively recent phenomena. NGrams has no results for the American variants. Is this a common phrase in the UK? Google NGrams result: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=turkey+voting+for+christmas%2Cturkeys+voting+for+christmas%2Cturkey+voting+for+thanksgiving%2Cturkeys+voting+for+thanksgiving&case_insensitive=on&year_start=1900&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=4&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cturkey%20voting%20for%20Christmas%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cturkeys%20voting%20for%20Christmas%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=turkey+voting+...
- LeoPanthera 12y ago
  The plural of anecdote is not data, but as a Brit, I am familiar with the phrase.
- songshu 12y ago
  From my life in Britain the phrase always brings to mind its usage in Parliament in 1979 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979_vote_of_no_confidence_in_the_government_of_James_Callaghan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979_vote_of_no_confidence_in_t...) which seems to have been the first time many of us encountered it.
  - dfc 12y ago
    That explanation fits well with the n-grams results. Thank you.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
    It comes from Callaghan's speech (as quoted in the article): "We can truly say that once the Leader of the Opposition discovered what the Liberals and the SNP would do, she found the courage of their convictions. So, tonight, the Conservative Party, which wants the Act repealed and opposes even devolution, will march through the Lobby with the SNP, which wants independence for Scotland, and with the Liberals, who want to keep the Act. What a massive display of unsullied principle! The minority parties have walked into a trap. If they win, there will be a general election. I am told that the current joke going around the House is that it is the first time in recorded history that turkeys have been known to vote for an early Christmas."
dalek2point3 12y ago
This site was due for a revamp anyway. Nowadays some of the most exciting maps are created with OpenStreetMap -- and the blog was featuring most of them anyway. The Google Maps name was not giving OpenStreetMap its due credit.
garrickvanburen 12y ago
to top it all off, Google Maps Mania runs on Blogspot (a Google property).
- Shog9 12y ago
  As does an awful lot of spam.
scottcanoni 12y ago
The only serious traffic I got to my website RoadPetition.com came from when it was featured on Google Maps Mania. Does anyone here have any feedback for me on this Google Maps Mashup? http://www.roadpetition.com/ http://www.roadpetition.com/
- bamnet 12y ago
  You should probably migrate to the V3 API.
whoismua 12y ago
A site I had used to get over 2000 visitors a day from Google, now it gets 20 to 30 a day. All the rest is going to Google ads and to a few sites that are brands and just so happened to advertise on Google. First, I don't trust any "assurances" from Googlers that Search isn't rigged. They are many subtle ways to easily shift traffic to certain sites as Larry Page and Sergey wrote in the original pagerank paper. Second, Google is a one trick pony, desperate to show growth to justify their super high PE. Third, Google, IMHO, is penalizing sites left and right to force them to advertise. Lost traffic? Advertise to get targeted traffic. Long term, short term...blah blah blah...makes no sense when Google slaps 40 ads on a a page and no organic links above fold. How is that good for the long term?
narrator 12y ago
I monitor some keywords that relate to obscure topics of interest of mine. If I look at search hits in the last 24 hours I get lots of pages of markov chain generated spam that looks like forums or blogs or community sites. It's freakin' ridiculous. The spammers are using machine learning to fool Google's machine learning.
narrator 12y ago
This is a preview of our AI dominated future. The AI will penalize you and you will have no idea why and have no recourse or appeal. It's also great for plausible deniability if it was indeed a "manual action".
- chillingeffect 12y ago
  It's a hint at how future search engines will diversify. Eventually Google will become more like the yellow pages where you kind of already know where everything is, you just need its database to get the last mile. Google will supply the commercial results, but not all of the world's information - only its most profitable information. If you want to know how to do something, how something works, you'll use a different, non-google indexer for searching, say, all of the "how to" sites: e.g. wikipedia, stack exchange, about.com, etc.
  - vwinsyee 12y ago
    If you want to know how to do something, how something works, you'll use a different, non-google indexer for searching, say, all of the "how to" sites: e.g. wikipedia, stack exchange, about.com, etc. I've gradually started to do this using DuckDuckGo's bangs [1]. It actually works pretty well if I know exactly which site I want to search. I do miss Google's ability to filter by time, though. [1] https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html
    - chillingeffect 12y ago
      Hail there, fellow out-of-liner in sub-zero downvote land! I guess by not towing the party line about Google, we're getting downvoted. Nevertheless, I wanted to take the time to thank you for your information about DDG's bangs. I've been using DDG since Snowden, but didn't know bout bangs! Looks very useful and shorter than typing "site:" in google. It kind of reminds me of multireddits
lnanek2 12y ago
I think it is healthy to cover all maps providers anyway. I had a rude awakening too a while back when I wanted to do a native Android hack on Google Glass using maps, but there is none of the usual MapActivity, etc. available. So Open Street Map was the way to go. Google Maps sometimes just isn't the solution, so it is good to know many.
userbinator 12y ago
As a (very) long-time user of the Internet, I've become increasingly disgusted at what it's become, in particular the rise of the whole "SEO phenomenon" that's basically become a cat-and-mouse game between site owners and search engines. Large corporations and SEO spammers have the resources to play this game, while the smaller independent sites (often managed by a single person) don't, and when they get penalised somehow, it's much harder for them to solve the "problem". The often interesting, unique, and more personal bits of the Internet are being made less accessible. I think the reason it became this way is entirely due to search engines encouraging this ranking game. Those who want their site to be at the top of the SERPs optimise for that, instead of focusing on what makes their sites' content valuable to actual users. The incentives are all wrong, from the perspective of what the Internet should be, and to fix this I think search engines should, instead of trying to develop more and more complex algorithms that the SEOs will just figure out how to beat, use a (periodically changing) random ranking. This would probably kill off SEO completely, as there would no longer be anything about the search engine to optimise for - everyone who wants visitors would instead focus on that content, so on those times when their site appears near the top of the rankings, they can attract and retain users who will preferably bookmark them and visit again.
- zevyoura 12y ago
  A random ranking? Of all results? Are you kidding? The vast, vast majority of results for a typical query are tangentially relevant at best.
  - userbinator 12y ago
    I don't mean all results that may or may not even have the search terms (which is what Google "helpfully" tries to do), but all results that actually have the given search terms. Hopefully this will mean users learn to use more specific search queries to get what they want, and thus ask more specific questions --- not a bad thing at all for the Internet and society in general either. The biggest advantage of a random ranking IMHO is that it completely eliminates any incentive to game the ranking system, and gives the "indie" portion of the Web a fairer chance at getting visitors. Let the users decide themselves individually what's relevant to them, and not Uncle Google.
icantthinkofone 12y ago
I've owned my own web development company for 10 years. In all this time, I've never had a problem with any of my client's sites scoring well in Google search. They have never lost their rank, never been de-listed, never "disappeared", never felt Google was out to get them or that Google was trying to kill them off. Google has always been helpful, given us free tools, told us what to do and how to do it, what is good and what is bad and how to do good by them. Then you run into people like this guy. I must be doing something wrong.

269 points by chippy 12y ago

From the post: "Tomorrow I'm going to feature the very last Google Maps on Google Maps Mania, The blog now gets 10% of the Google search traffic it did just 18 months ago. With Google attempting to kill off Google Maps Mania it would be like a turkey voting for Christmas for me to continue to promote Google Maps and the Google Maps API. Last week I came very close to giving up completely. But despite Google I still think there is an audience for the blog. So from Wednesday Google Maps Mania will be featuring maps created with Open Street Map, Map Box, Leaflet and other map providers. If you have any Google Maps you want promoting you have about 24 hours left to submit them to Google Maps Mania." ---- The blog is at: http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.co.uk/ http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.co.uk/

Vik1ng 12y ago
normal g+ post: https://plus.google.com/100293158896126941899/posts/T7huGEQ7AG3 https://plus.google.com/100293158896126941899/posts/T7huGEQ7...
dfc 12y ago
I am curious why you pasted the entire content of the linked page as a comment. Is plus.google.com frequently blocked and/or unreachable?
- chippy 12y ago
  I was unsure of the visibility of the page and unsure if the page could be deleted or edited before we had time to discuss it. It was also just a paragraph of text.
- silverbax88 12y ago
  Yes, Google+ is usually blocked on corporate networks. Which is really no big loss.
  - thrownaway2424 12y ago
    I think you used the word "usually" to mean "in my narrow and by no means representative experience."
    - silverbax88 12y ago
      I mean blocked on most major networks by Barracuda and WebSense by default. So, I'll stick with my original statement, thanks.
      - Karunamon 12y ago
        I think they were more referring to the snarky "no great loss" comment..

rpedela 12y ago

How is Google trying to kill off Google Maps Mania?

kitbrennan 12y ago
From the comments: Google searches 'Panda' updates. More info on Panda here - http://searchengineland.com/metafilter-penalized-google-192168 http://searchengineland.com/metafilter-penalized-google-1921...
ChuckMcM 12y ago
The scourge of low quality content has Google putting more and more pest control into their algorithm. That has started killing off the traffic to actual quality sites.
- wcfields 12y ago
  Most notably, it's really taken a hard hit to MetaFilter[1]; the site had been funded by a $5 fee to join (post/comment) and Google Adwords on AskMetaFilter[2]. Now they've had to lay off several moderators which contributed to the sites high quality. [1] http://metafilter.com http://metafilter.com [2] http://ask.metafilter.com http://ask.metafilter.com

brokentone 12y ago

While this makes a certain amount of sense (not promoting a tool from a company that is not promoting your content as well in another arena), I'm actually glad that Google works in a blanket manner rather than an individual manner. Assessing "manual" promotions of domains could get really sticky really quickly.

jrochkind1 12y ago
What makes you confident that Google doesn't manually adjust weighting and ranking for individual sites? I've always suspected they might -- both increasing and decreasing ranking -- although they won't want this to be well-known for legal and other reasons. The legal reasons _might_ be enough to keep them from doing it at all, it's true, but I've always suspected they do it anyway. I mean, we know they do it to penalize certain sites they believe violated their ad rules, right? So we know their systems at least possess the technical ability to manually penalize sites. But I'm not an expert in this stuff, which is why I start with a question (it wasn't rhetorical!).
- morgante 12y ago
  Google does engage in manual actions, but such actions are always reported in webmaster tools.

fidotron 12y ago

I seriously thought from the title "That must be because they've come to hate new Google Maps so much" and was surprised that wasn't the underlying reason. To be honest, I've always been dubious of any business that is familiar enough with Google's search versions that they name them. It's indicative of being way too dependent on a single entity.

ssharp 12y ago
It's not necessarily indicative of being "dependent" on Google organic traffic. Even if organic search drives just 10% of your revenue, that 10% may still be big enough to warrant plenty of attention on the organic search channel. Enough to warrant paying attention to algorithm changes and versions. I'll never disagree with the idea that you should diversify your marketing and not become dependent on a single channel, especially a channel you cannot control, but to ignore or neglect that channel when it actually matters is not a better or noble solution. So far in my experience with the new Panda update is that it's actually correcting some sites it probably shouldn't have previously penalized in other Panda iterations.
billmalarky 12y ago
Publishers are extremely dependent on Google. Traffic referred from Google has a much higher ad CPM than direct traffic. Mainly because transient traffic is much more likely to click on an ad to go elsewhere than your actual users.
mathattack 12y ago
It seems like a blog specifically about one company would by definition be dependent on it, no?

themodelplumber 12y ago

I'm sure the Maps team will be excited to hear about this. On the other hand I wonder what kind of sites this website is competing with. I don't think the site is really best suited to the blog format; maybe it'd be a good idea to rethink the presentation and throw some of the latest SEO strategy in there as well. You can't just make a blog these days and do ordinary blog things and expect to collect the same SERP pension every year.

Pxtl 12y ago

I'm starting to wonder if killing the "content farms" like About and Answers and the like aren't a case where the cure is worse than the disease. Often when you search for a "how do I" question, the content farms are the only things that produce a result that's even vaguely topical, at least before Pandas. I mean, it usually went content farms -> Pure SEO spam -> actual relevant results. Content farms weren't good, but they still beat the SEO spammers. At least the content farms had some minimal connection to the topic, unlike say eBay.

thetrb 12y ago
I actually liked sites like eHow, but I'm probably in the minority here. If I wanted a quick answer for a question these sites were providing a good, quick answer. They are not going into a lot of depth, of course, but if I want that then I just use a bit more specific search terms.
- EGreg 12y ago
  So now I am supposed to search on eHow directly? Oh noes.
  - xionon 12y ago
    I think the point is that there are multiple sites like eHow, and searching each of them individually and then deciding which results were the best is sub-optimal. Plus, it prevents the serendipitous discovery of new sites like eHow. If only there were a way to search multiple content farm sites at once, and rank those results according to how useful they were...
    - EGreg 12y ago
      Google already does this, by its measure of "useful" (to you). If you don't like it, you can search those sites directly. For example search for "ehow:how to ask a girl out" was that so hard?
      - 12y ago

EGreg 12y ago

And this is why you shouldn't rely on Google for your traffic, but diversify off of it asap. In fact dont rely on any one company. Use the open web.

todd3834 12y ago
Could you give some examples of alternative ways to get Google quality traffic that fall under "the open web"?
- TheMagicHorsey 12y ago
  Exactly. I want to be edified as well. I have not found another way to get organic traffic.
  - EGreg 12y ago
    Develop content that people would share with one another, and find on other sites. Videos - develop videos that drive "traffic" to your website ... Vimeo YouTube 5min or your own site Blogs - have people in your company start writing blogs and sharing their expertise on the web, and others will naturally want to check out your products ... LinkedIn Blogger or your own site PR - have people cultivate relationships in forums and with publications and post stuff that your bloggers write there are many ways to get traffic besides relying on one search engine and by the way, even ON that search engine, you should be creating all kinds of things to "take over" the first page, if you are really trying to vie for traffic e.g. on GOOGLE: youtube videos will show up if you make them google+ profiles will show up if you make them local listings, images, maps, bla bla bla which means Google is telling you to upload a lot of content to GOOGLE owned properties in order to promote your site so if you really want google traffic that badly you should do it!
    - Vik1ng 12y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_search https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_search So what you say might answer the first question, but not the follow up one. Well, your "e.g. on GOOGLE:" answers it, but the fact that you use google for that example already shows that there really isn't any way around that. He wasn't asking how to improve ranking. He was asking for alternatives to google search traffic. (Unless I got that wrong)

uptown 12y ago

OT, but does anyone else have wild zooming issues with the "new" Google Maps on OS X with a scroll-wheel mouse? It borders on unusable as the zoom seems to completely have a mind of its own. Edit: This seems to be the issue I'm experiencing: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/maps/6D072fsK93E%5B176-200-false%5D https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/maps/6D072fsK...

LeoPanthera 12y ago
I have that issue too. It seems to depend on the mouse. It doesn't happen with my Logitech mouse as long as I set the wheel to "clicky" mode.
morbius 12y ago
If you have a mouse with detents, there seems to be no problem.

jacquesm 12y ago

Any kind of algorithmic classifier will have false positives for a given level of confidence. The lower the threshold at which you start banning sites the more false positives you will have, there is no silver bullet here. So when Google decided to crack down on a class of sites sites that share enough traits with the sites that were being axed came into the danger zone and a number of those ended up being penalized enough that they are no longer viable / interesting enough to maintain. This appears to be one of those cases. Being dependent on a single entity your hosting, for the traffic you are receiving as well as the service you are directly promoting (in this case maps) makes you an add-on to their eco-system. I wonder how many small but viable websites are still in this position and how many of them will give up after finding their traffic decimated because they ended up being a false positive in some filter. It might be more productive to try to figure out what exactly caused the penalty, but I fully understand if the owner of the site just wants to move on and become as independent of this as he can. Let's hope that 'pointing go google maps' versus 'pointing to open streetmaps' won't trigger another penalty because then he might lose what is still there or a good sized fraction of that.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

mbrubeck 12y ago

What gets me is that Google employees like JohnMu (in the following thread) are actually telling authors to hide large portions of their sites from Google's indexer, in order to prevent all their pages from receiving penalties for "low-quality" content: https://productforums.google.com/forum/m/?hl=en#!mydiscussions/webmasters/T-4i0yB7CrQ https://productforums.google.com/forum/m/?hl=en#!mydiscussio... That feels like a step back from Google's stated mission to "to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful": http://www.google.com/about/company/ http://www.google.com/about/company/ Apparently, only the information that maximizes search advertising revenue is worth organizing and making accessible. I understand that fighting SEO spam is an important part of keeping search usable, but there must be a way to do it that doesn't lead to completely cutting out large parts of the "indie" web (e.g. posts in discussion forums, and other sites that host user-generated content).

valarauca1 12y ago
Wait you mean a for profit company's goal is to maximize profit? We need to stop pretending Google is a rich Mozilla, They're a poor Microsoft.
- ambler0 12y ago
  By what measure is Google poorer than Microsoft? They have less free cash flow, but a greater market cap. http://ycharts.com/companies/MSFT http://ycharts.com/companies/MSFT http://ycharts.com/companies/GOOG http://ycharts.com/companies/GOOG
  - joshjdr 12y ago
    I think you nailed it there. Market cap is valuation and subject to change on a whim [edit- specifically, it's a measure of sentiment; it's a prediction of future cash flows] . Free cash flow is probably a more accurate measurement of the "poor" vs. "rich" concept. Let's be honest though- both companies are filthy rich.
  - silverbax88 12y ago

dfc 12y ago

Turkey voting for christmas That was a new phrase for me. It seems to be chiefly British but the Wikipedia page suggest that the American alternative is "turkey voting for thanksgiving." I searched google ngrams for "turkey[s] voting for christmas|thanksgiving" and it seems that the British variant is a relatively recent phenomena. NGrams has no results for the American variants. Is this a common phrase in the UK? Google NGrams result: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=turkey+voting+for+christmas%2Cturkeys+voting+for+christmas%2Cturkey+voting+for+thanksgiving%2Cturkeys+voting+for+thanksgiving&case_insensitive=on&year_start=1900&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=4&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cturkey%20voting%20for%20Christmas%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cturkeys%20voting%20for%20Christmas%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=turkey+voting+...

LeoPanthera 12y ago
The plural of anecdote is not data, but as a Brit, I am familiar with the phrase.
songshu 12y ago
From my life in Britain the phrase always brings to mind its usage in Parliament in 1979 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979_vote_of_no_confidence_in_the_government_of_James_Callaghan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979_vote_of_no_confidence_in_t...) which seems to have been the first time many of us encountered it.
- dfc 12y ago
  That explanation fits well with the n-grams results. Thank you.
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
  It comes from Callaghan's speech (as quoted in the article): "We can truly say that once the Leader of the Opposition discovered what the Liberals and the SNP would do, she found the courage of their convictions. So, tonight, the Conservative Party, which wants the Act repealed and opposes even devolution, will march through the Lobby with the SNP, which wants independence for Scotland, and with the Liberals, who want to keep the Act. What a massive display of unsullied principle! The minority parties have walked into a trap. If they win, there will be a general election. I am told that the current joke going around the House is that it is the first time in recorded history that turkeys have been known to vote for an early Christmas."

dalek2point3 12y ago

This site was due for a revamp anyway. Nowadays some of the most exciting maps are created with OpenStreetMap -- and the blog was featuring most of them anyway. The Google Maps name was not giving OpenStreetMap its due credit.

garrickvanburen 12y ago

to top it all off, Google Maps Mania runs on Blogspot (a Google property).

Shog9 12y ago
As does an awful lot of spam.

scottcanoni 12y ago

The only serious traffic I got to my website RoadPetition.com came from when it was featured on Google Maps Mania. Does anyone here have any feedback for me on this Google Maps Mashup? http://www.roadpetition.com/ http://www.roadpetition.com/

bamnet 12y ago
You should probably migrate to the V3 API.

whoismua 12y ago

A site I had used to get over 2000 visitors a day from Google, now it gets 20 to 30 a day. All the rest is going to Google ads and to a few sites that are brands and just so happened to advertise on Google. First, I don't trust any "assurances" from Googlers that Search isn't rigged. They are many subtle ways to easily shift traffic to certain sites as Larry Page and Sergey wrote in the original pagerank paper. Second, Google is a one trick pony, desperate to show growth to justify their super high PE. Third, Google, IMHO, is penalizing sites left and right to force them to advertise. Lost traffic? Advertise to get targeted traffic. Long term, short term...blah blah blah...makes no sense when Google slaps 40 ads on a a page and no organic links above fold. How is that good for the long term?

narrator 12y ago

I monitor some keywords that relate to obscure topics of interest of mine. If I look at search hits in the last 24 hours I get lots of pages of markov chain generated spam that looks like forums or blogs or community sites. It's freakin' ridiculous. The spammers are using machine learning to fool Google's machine learning.

narrator 12y ago

This is a preview of our AI dominated future. The AI will penalize you and you will have no idea why and have no recourse or appeal. It's also great for plausible deniability if it was indeed a "manual action".

chillingeffect 12y ago
It's a hint at how future search engines will diversify. Eventually Google will become more like the yellow pages where you kind of already know where everything is, you just need its database to get the last mile. Google will supply the commercial results, but not all of the world's information - only its most profitable information. If you want to know how to do something, how something works, you'll use a different, non-google indexer for searching, say, all of the "how to" sites: e.g. wikipedia, stack exchange, about.com, etc.
- vwinsyee 12y ago
  If you want to know how to do something, how something works, you'll use a different, non-google indexer for searching, say, all of the "how to" sites: e.g. wikipedia, stack exchange, about.com, etc. I've gradually started to do this using DuckDuckGo's bangs [1]. It actually works pretty well if I know exactly which site I want to search. I do miss Google's ability to filter by time, though. [1] https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html
  - chillingeffect 12y ago
    Hail there, fellow out-of-liner in sub-zero downvote land! I guess by not towing the party line about Google, we're getting downvoted. Nevertheless, I wanted to take the time to thank you for your information about DDG's bangs. I've been using DDG since Snowden, but didn't know bout bangs! Looks very useful and shorter than typing "site:" in google. It kind of reminds me of multireddits

lnanek2 12y ago

I think it is healthy to cover all maps providers anyway. I had a rude awakening too a while back when I wanted to do a native Android hack on Google Glass using maps, but there is none of the usual MapActivity, etc. available. So Open Street Map was the way to go. Google Maps sometimes just isn't the solution, so it is good to know many.

userbinator 12y ago

As a (very) long-time user of the Internet, I've become increasingly disgusted at what it's become, in particular the rise of the whole "SEO phenomenon" that's basically become a cat-and-mouse game between site owners and search engines. Large corporations and SEO spammers have the resources to play this game, while the smaller independent sites (often managed by a single person) don't, and when they get penalised somehow, it's much harder for them to solve the "problem". The often interesting, unique, and more personal bits of the Internet are being made less accessible. I think the reason it became this way is entirely due to search engines encouraging this ranking game. Those who want their site to be at the top of the SERPs optimise for that, instead of focusing on what makes their sites' content valuable to actual users. The incentives are all wrong, from the perspective of what the Internet should be, and to fix this I think search engines should, instead of trying to develop more and more complex algorithms that the SEOs will just figure out how to beat, use a (periodically changing) random ranking. This would probably kill off SEO completely, as there would no longer be anything about the search engine to optimise for - everyone who wants visitors would instead focus on that content, so on those times when their site appears near the top of the rankings, they can attract and retain users who will preferably bookmark them and visit again.

zevyoura 12y ago
A random ranking? Of all results? Are you kidding? The vast, vast majority of results for a typical query are tangentially relevant at best.
- userbinator 12y ago
  I don't mean all results that may or may not even have the search terms (which is what Google "helpfully" tries to do), but all results that actually have the given search terms. Hopefully this will mean users learn to use more specific search queries to get what they want, and thus ask more specific questions --- not a bad thing at all for the Internet and society in general either. The biggest advantage of a random ranking IMHO is that it completely eliminates any incentive to game the ranking system, and gives the "indie" portion of the Web a fairer chance at getting visitors. Let the users decide themselves individually what's relevant to them, and not Uncle Google.

icantthinkofone 12y ago

I've owned my own web development company for 10 years. In all this time, I've never had a problem with any of my client's sites scoring well in Google search. They have never lost their rank, never been de-listed, never "disappeared", never felt Google was out to get them or that Google was trying to kill them off. Google has always been helpful, given us free tools, told us what to do and how to do it, what is good and what is bad and how to do good by them. Then you run into people like this guy. I must be doing something wrong.