MapQuest Dropping Local Blog Support
by Matt McGee on Jul 16, 2010 in Industry, Promotion
In one of the first articles on Hyperlocal Blogger, I showed and wrote about an opportunity for local bloggers to get exposure through the popular MapQuest web site: MapQuest Wants Your Local Content.
They don’t want it anymore.
Greg Sterling first mentioned in passing that MapQuest Local — the company’s excellent local start page — is going away, and that immediately made me wonder if the local blog content would be, too. I spoke today with MapQuest GM Christian Dwyer and he confirmed that it is … although MapQuest may bring it back in the future.
Background
If you’re not familiar, take a look at local.mapquest.com and you’ll see what this is about. That’s the home page for MapQuest Local, and it should default to your current location. You should see, somewhere near the top, a “Blogs in…” widget like this one from the Seattle page:
You can see that there’s an “Add Your Blog” button, and some real estate agent has wisely taken MapQuest up on that offer. I don’t know how much exposure she’s received, but this was always a pretty brain-dead simple thing to do. Even if it didn’t lead to a ton of new visitors to your hyperlocal blog, it also didn’t require a ton of effort to setup … so any exposure was a fair trade.
Current Situation
MapQuest Local will eventually go away, Dwyer tells me, and the support for accepting local blog content will go with it. He says there’s no timetable for this to happen, though; it depends on how quickly MapQuest users adopt the new MapQuest home page at new.mapquest.com. When there’s substantial adoption there, the “classic” version of MapQuest, along with MapQuest Local, will go away.
For now, MapQuest is bringing in local blog content … but, as an AOL-owned property, it’s focusing on content from AOL’s growing Patch network. Dwyer showed me Maplewood, NJ, restaurant listings in MapQuest’s system that are pulling business information from the Patch hyperlocal site covering Maplewood.
Future Possibilities
But all isn’t lost for local bloggers. Dwyer did say that MapQuest is thinking about how to capture local blog content from non-Patch sources and make it part of the main experience on the new MapQuest.com. A likely addition to come sooner than that will be local news sourced from AOL’s news property.
Bottom line: It may be many months before MapQuest Local goes away, so if you want to submit your blog to the local site covering your area … go for it. Just be aware that it won’t be around forever.
(PS – while you’re on MapQuest, do check out the new site. It’s got some pretty darn cool mapping tools that I’ve not seen on Google Maps or anywhere else.)
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I don’t ask this to be snarky – this is a sincere question: Does anyone out there in your readership routinely use Mapquest? I don’t know a soul or a site that doesn’t use Google Maps … well, the occasional Yahoo! Map. But very occasional. Don’t really know who has the best features, just know that Google works well and is part of the biggest search engine in the world blah blah blah. So does everyone in Patch (which is creeping this way, having posted editor jobs this week for Bainbridge Island and Bellevue) have to use Mapquest?
I guess HLB readers would have to answer that directly, but I can say this in regards to the larger population:
MapQuest is the #2 mapping site behind Google Maps (according to comScore and others who chart such stuff). And, on a more anecdotal level, earlier this year while I was speaking at a local SEO conference, I asked an audience of about 60 people who used Google Maps and who used MapQuest. It was about 50/50.
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