Comments on: Google Discontinues Tags

By: The Logic Behind the Demise of Google Tags | Understanding Google Maps & Local Search

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 10:01:06 +0000

[...] a company like Google discontinues a product like Tags there is almost always more than one [...]

By: panzermike

panzermike — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 13:14:44 +0000

I personally liked the tags, and it definitely makes your listing stand out. I disagree that reviews should have any effect on rankings. Too easy to game reviews, and there are now companies who basically write bogus reviews for a fee and try and bury negative reviews (they may have written themselves), for a fee.

Now SEO will become an underground of “vote rings” on HOTPOT. Just a bad idea to allow this. Especially knowing that competitors will write BS reviews to try and hurt their competition under fake names with no fear of being sued for defamation. EXTREMELY EVIL!

By: nanomano

nanomano — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 22:31:43 +0000

I’m not seeing images showing with places on first page. Not a 100% sure on this.

By: Lee

Lee — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 21:58:41 +0000

Well that ends one concern of mine… I guess I don’t have to worry about them hitting my credit card anymore for a places account that’s suspended or maybe I should…

By: Mike Ramsey

Mike Ramsey — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 21:22:19 +0000

Well, Good move. I felt the value of a tag diminished considerably at the roll out of the O-pack.

I did like the idea for tags though.

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 19:45:12 +0000

Once they stopped allowing visits to the owner website, the product offered little of value other than a pretty flag in the listing. Its hard to say the value of the that.

I just looked at two dashboards that had the product.
It one dashboard it showed 110 total actions and 5 clicks on the Tag link. In the other there was 1694 actions and 27 clicks on the Tag link. Not much value in my mind for a click into places.

Obviously it didn’t drive enough traffic or value for Google either.

It was using up valuable front page realestate and capping the income for that real estate at $25. Imagine an “offer” at that same spot that captures 50% of the take…

By: earlpearl

earlpearl — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 19:34:29 +0000

At $25/month that is a tiny product for a business w/$8.5 in revenues for the last quarter. One thing about tags is that it moved them into direct contact w/ small businesses. They have since expanded into boost.

Correct me if I’m wrong but I understand they added about 300 sales people to their boost campaign. That is a significant size for a phone campaign. Will they continue the campaign with boost. Will they try and utilize those people into other campaigns.

My own experience with tags was that it had a relatively low volume of clicks relative to clicks to the maps link and/or the directions page as per Google Dashboard (cr@ppy analysis product that it is.) Of course different types of tags could create different volumes of traffic.

From a revenue perspective and from the value of putting people into Tags it couldn’t be a big payoff…while it still gave them exposure into other elements of the business world.

By: MiriamEllis

MiriamEllis — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 19:21:12 +0000

And…drum roll…our new product will be called:
“HOT TAG POTS”

Hee hee.

By: Stever

Stever — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 19:04:02 +0000

good riddance!