SEO out to help or hinder – Transcription

Okay. We’re down to our last one. Clifford. You’re getting your exercise today, aren’t you? I wish. What? I guess I’ll allow this. I’m here talking about while he’s doing this, I’m here talking about search engine optimization. It’s a really boring subject. But pay attention. Because this is going to be fun. [ Laughter ] I got interested in search engine optimization because I look at every new mapper in the state of Washington and I see a lot of these companies trying to put stuff into OpenStreetMap. One of the things I have noticed is they’re putting a lot of garbage in there. Uh oh. Garbage like that. [ Laughter ]

I don’t know how to make it go away. You want to start over? That’s a really good
Yeah. Okay. I gave you some extra seconds. They’re putting stuff in with no tags or at least not useful tags. One of the worst things I saw in fact the other day, they put the node right tonight street to say this is where that business is. That’s probably not true. And so really frustrating. And I’m tired of working, because they never answer any change set comments you put on there. You’ve sent them a personal message in OpenStreetMap. They don’t answer. They don’t talk you. I’m hitting the wrong button. So why are they doing this? They believe that they can improve their customer’s page ranking. Which means they’re going to make more money. So people pay a lot of money to have their page ranking improved. And they do this by having back links. And thing by putting their Website in, OpenStreetMap, that’s going to improve their page rank. That means they’re going to make more money. So back links. Back links are nothing more than the URLs you see. The interesting thing about with the Googles of the world do, is they look at the page authority of whoever has got that link in there. And the higher the page authority, the more you’re going raise up on page ranking. OpenStreetMap is really high. One of the highest out there. I put Mapbox and DigitalGlobe on here because I knew there would be a few people from here. Interestingly enough, since 2009 we have been adding a no follow reference tag to every URL. And that tells the search engines, just ignore this. It’s useless data. Don’t count it. But they’re still putting this stuff in there. So what should we do? They’re not talking to us very well. So I met with one company that seems to want to talk. They’re not doing anything yet. I’m looking to do a trial, I’m looking for mappers, that’s why I’m here, to do a community import using map roulette of this data. This is good POIs that we would love to have on OpenStreetMap. Us putting it in there, I think we’re going to get much better results. So interestingly enough, while I was doing this, I discovered something I just did not know. Websites are now including what they call micro data on them. This is not data that you and I see. This is embedded in the Website. So, like this local Jiffy Lube, the embedded information. Tells the hours of operation, address, phone numbers, the business name, with a type of business. This is all embedded in there in a structured format. It’s an organization called schema.org. It’s on GitHub. It’s a community process. Thing there’s like 10 12 million Website URLs that have this data in there. It’s open data excuse me. It’s a creative comments type of information. So we can all use it. This is the example that of that same Website I was talking about. This is the Jiffy Lube near my house. This is all the information that you can get out of Google. They have a structured data tool. And you just put a URL in there and you can see if there’s anything in there. So I found this right near my home. I have been staying on my trip over here I have been staying at Hilton hotels. None of the Hilton properties have any of this data in there. So you see it’s there. But it’s still spreading. It’s relatively new. But what’s interesting about this thing, if we can put this into our editors so if the editor goes out and queries these Websites, brings back the information, we could eliminate typos. We could give consistent business names. We could give more data in there. If there’s anything I hate, it’s typing a lot of data about a business, you know? It gets boring. So this would make it really simple to collect a lot of that information relatively easily. So that’s my proposal. Going work with some SEOs. And I hope to see a lot of the stuff in there. And hopefully the Ryans of the world will support this. Thank you very much. [ Applause ] Cool. I enjoyed all those talks very, very much. Thank you, all the speakers. This was an exciting session. We have some time for questions. So I think most if not all of the speakers are still around. So how shall we do this? Let’s just open the floor for questions. Who has a question? You right there. Is there a running microphone? I’ll just get this one, then. AUDIENCE: And so my question is for Brian. Thank you for ID. I have several thousand edits in ID. But the one tool that and also thank you for the simplicity of the interface. That makes it very approachable. It’s the first tool I teach when I do map a thons. But then I will be working at the same time and then people will say, hey, how come I can’t do that? And what they’re talking about is the building tool in JOSM. So if you could put one tool and I would suggest the building tool. Because it would make so much better product coming out because inevitably, when I’m validating a hot project, I see sloppy looking buildings and they came from ID. Yep. So, yeah, I can respond to that. Actually, there’s a couple features that we at least I’ve tagged as priority. And the building tool is one of those that has been on that priority list for like kind of a while. Like you said, we do try to keep ID very simple. We don’t add buttons for building tool. The building tool is kind of blocked by this ability to add certain features like that like toggle able modes. I’m adding buildings now. I have an issue for that and I want to get to it soonish. But, you know, I know it can’t come soon enough. This is something that does come up a lot. So I hear you. All right. Other questions? There’s got sob some more. Don’t be afraid. I have one. Is OpenStreetCam going to be in ID? Yeah, I like that question. When is OpenStreetMap going to be in ID? I had a question for you, Martha. So I love in Salt Lake City. We try very hard to get more people. How are your results going to be useful for me as someone who wants to promote cycling elsewhere? In Salt Lake City, for example? I think they’re going to be useful because Strada is used nationwide. And different city governments are purchasing and buying the data to make decisions. And when looking at data, some cities like San Francisco have automated counters that run 24/ in different areas. And other cities, it’s impossible to find manual count data. Once we understand the relationship between the data, we can feel we can present this modeling framework to city governments and they can use it for their specific city using Strada data to increase infrastructure and increase people on bikes on the road. When is it ready? May. My master’s will be done then. Thanks a lot. Any other questions? AUDIENCE: Hi. So the question is about the schema.org polls. So first of all, I love the idea. But I think it can cause problems such as stale data. Like a bar decides to change their working hours, but we pulled it only once. So that’s one thing. And the other thing is can automation help here in the sense that we can just find where the Websites are that are tagged on the pulls and just pull the schema.org information multiple times? Listening to the talks on automation this morning, that was the first question that came to my mind is, okay, if we put the URL on there, that means you can automate the process. And OpenStreetMap could literally once a day, once a week, once an hour, update that information. Good or bad, I don’t know the answer to that. Also, the other problem is, what if the Website’s wrong? Because a lot of these companies don’t update the Websites all the time too. What’s the right answer? But I do think it’s I do think it’s a potential there to get some good data in there that, you know, most of us don’t like entering. Opening hours are really a pain to enter, especially in ID. And yeah. So yeah. I’m hopeful. Thanks. We have time for a couple more if anyone else has a question? No? Oh. There is here. AUDIENCE: Yeah, this question is for Bryan. We’re trying to keep ID editor as simple as possible, the more simple it is, the more people in the community doing it. The only thing I would ever wish we had in ID editor that we don’t have right now is the ability to multiple select items. Be able to tag a surface type on a road that’s fragmented up, for example. Is that something you guys may consider? Yeah, that’s actually ticketed also. This idea that you could select multiple things and apply a tag to all of them at the same time. Yeah. So that’s also kind of on our list of things that I haven’t just closed the issue saying, no, way. Never. But it’s something that like you said, like a new user who really doesn’t understand what they’re doing could do a lot of damage with that too. So it’s one of those features that has to be done in a careful way. Yeah. We do want that. AUDIENCE: Awesome. Thanks. Cool. It looks like that’s really it, then. Okay, guys. I’ve enjoyed this session with you. Thanks for joining. Next up is in this let’s see, north, south yeah. This is North. Microsoft Alexandra is going to talk about OSM in the age of autonomous vehicles here. That’s about 3:15. And interesting research in the other room. I recommend both, but you can’t split up, so you have to choose. Enjoy.