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Fun with Google Maps

Creative ways of wasting your time with Google Maps

My previous two Google related articles focused on building a Google map to display your company's HQ or branch network. I shall for the purpose of this article focus on the fun things you can do with Google Maps. Yes, folks, it is time to let our hair down.

Before you begin, log in to your Google Account and enter http://maps.google.co.uk into your address bar of the browser, or click the link entitled 'Maps' seen on the top left. Then click the link entitled 'My Maps'.

By then you should see a selection of user created maps. Above these, you are given the choice of creating a new map, or browsing Google's map directory. Click the link entitled 'Browse the directory'. By then you should see within your browser several add-ons for your Google Map.

Fun things to do with Google Maps:

1. Dig a hole through the Earth: always wanted to dig a great hole and end up in the middle of Australia? Google lets you do just that without the need of a spade or being frazzled by the Earth's inner core. From Altrincham we ended up being a few hundred miles south east of New Zealand;
2. Add elevation contours: if you enjoy walking or hill climbing, this is a most useful addition;
3. See Earth by night: ever wondered what the Earth looked like at night? This overlay enables you to see which parts of the planet are besieged by pollution from street lights;
4. Calculate the area of your front garden: the Area and Distance Calculator allows you to do just that;
5. View traffic jams: in some cities, Google Maps enables you to see which parts of the world are most congested. I was vaguely unsurprised to find the road to Bluewater being absolutely chocka;
6. View photographs of each place: by hovering over the 'More' link at the top right of the map window, select the tickbox left of 'Photos'. You will find the UK or any other part of the world covered by thumbnail images, lovingly contributed by fellow web users through Panoramio. Another plug-in is available through Geograph;
7. Watch videos through YouTube: again, by hovering over the 'More' link; select the tickbox left of 'Videos' and click on one of the thumbnailed TV screen graphics. The video plays within the speech bubble on Google Maps;
8. View Wikipedia entries: again, by hovering over the 'More' link; select the tickbox left of Wikipedia and click on any of the rounded square icons with a 'W'. From each entry is a link to the full article on Wikipedia.org;
9. See the seven strange wonders of the world: everybody knows that the sole survivor of the 7 Wonders of the World are the Great Pyramids, but this plug-in focuses on the esoteric, such as the Bermuda Triangle and Area 51;
10. Check Ordnance Survey grid references: a most useful tool for ramblers checking 4 and 6 figure grid references. Be warned, this can be quite addictive.

Mancunian1001, 24 July 2009.

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Social Bookmarking | Scuttle, Scuttleplus, Pligg

To follow on from my article on linking, I wanted to write about social bookmarking, while many may think the social bookmarking bandwagon has passed, there is still some weight and benefits to using it for your linking strategy.

As I wrote before, Linking strategy is just that, its a strategy, it should consist of many different angles, whatever works for you is good, linking on its own these days has become a job within SEO and I remember the days when you were a webmaster, an SEO, a server admin and the full IT within a company :)

If you look around there are lists of useless spammy scuttle and pligg sites, which I would imagine would just start to look like giant link farms to google and not a great idea to start submitting your links to any sort of social sites but some of them carry great value, can get your new sites indexed very quickly and can even rank for your niche if your using long tail keywords.

Delicious is one of these examples, although the main page has a high PR some of the inner pages dont show any although a link from delicious can be well worthwhile for fast indexing and carrying some weight. Alot of the sceptics claimed years ago oh delicious is 'nofollow' but with my recent post about nofollow it seems that at the time the social sites were adding the 'no follow' tag to all the big social bookmarking sites google was actually not even seeing it the way we thought, or according to Matt Cutts.

It should be noted that a lot of social sites use 'redirects' for the links so you will not get benefits of incoming links as its a dynamically generated. For example 'domainname.com/linkredirect?=id0143' where the id is in the sites database as your outoing link.

There are lots of pieces of software for 'automating' social bookmarking on the market, I can only say it really is best if you have the time to do things manually, although semi automating some of the tasks for genuine bookmarking is not considered as black hat or spamming. There is a line and if your signing up for 1000s of bookmarking sites with senuke on auto sign up and spamming 1000s of long tail keywords in order to rank for them, then yes I'd say thats not a great thing to do.

So to summarise, I would include social bookmarking from some choice sites to your linking strategy, use of software is fine for making your life easier beware though alot of them dont work like they claim.

These are some of the things to take into consideration.

1. Google PR on the home page
2. Google PR in inner pages
3. Do the links use redirects (read above)
4. Are the links 'nofollow' (questionable)
5. Does the site use anchor text in the links
6. Is the domain of a decent age - 1/2 years +
7. Are there a decent amount of pages indexed in google? - 1000+
   

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