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Comment by Matt_Cutts | Hacker News Reader

Gotcha--thanks, Paul. I'm about to get on a plane, but we'll get this figured out where we're not sending as much hostload toward HN.

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If only we could all get our Google woes fixed in such a manner.

seriously. i can't get a hospital to show up in google maps... no human for me to talk to. HN is number 4 instead of 1 google page one, they're right on it.

This is why I don't understand the anti-promotion crowd who think promoting oneself and building an audience is a bad thing. Having the implicit threat of an audience you can address is a major lever to getting decent service nowadays.

I'm certainly not against promoting myself where I think some attention is merited, but ultimately that kind of thing is close to a zero sum game in that the amount of 'famous' people is fairly limited.

Bad PR always seems to get instant action - it's more damage control than anything else.

If you have an audience, you have PR power.

Which hospital? Seems like this thread has at least one pair of google-eyeballs looking at it.

i'd rather not drop the name here. but it's a verified listing and i've used the "report a problem" 3 times now. If they're not checking that... :(

You can fix this yourself.

In the lower-right corner of Google Maps there is a tiny link that says, "Edit in Google Map Maker". Click this link and you can edit Google Maps. Your edits get sent to Google and they'll approve/deny it in typically a few days.

it's a verified listing (do you know hard it is to convince the IT dept to take their automated phone system offline so i could verify a google maps listing? It was nuts and no google didn't offer the postcard method) so i don't see why i have to enter the same info again, but i did.

the listing only shows up if you type the exact name of the hospital into the search bar, which is useless.

Does that mean at Google you can manually set the system to treat different sites differently?

I don't mean the ranking but other aspects - like you guys blacklisted some domains which produce low quality content in wholesale. (I don't know if the algorithm was tweaked to detect and filter such sources or if it was a manual thing.)

Does that mean at Google you can manually set the system to treat different sites differently?

Webmaster Tools has a crawl rate slider which operate on a site-by-site basis, and that's existed for quite a while now.

If you're asking if they can manually boost a site's ranking, hopefully that isn't what's being suggested.

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