By: Greg Sterling | Source: searchengineland.com

When one company is in competition with another, it usually won’t point consumers towards the competitor’s products. Sure, it happens – some corporations believe that they shine in comparison tests – but it’s fairly rare. The practice just became even more unusual, as Google ceased to promote MapQuest and Yahoo Maps on its main results page. Google has taken out the links to Yahoo Maps & MapQuest in their special local section in the Google web search results pages.

Google used to suggest these alternatives, along with Google Maps, so readers could make a choice – and Google probably had a great measurement of Maps popularity and branding by tracking the click thrus.

Searching directly for Yahoo Maps or MapQuest of course provides links to those sites. But the removal of those links from “generic” searches could impact their traffic in a meaningful way. MapQuest, which is the category leader, has plenty of direct traffic but Yahoo and Google Maps are running neck and neck. And so Yahoo may be the site that suffers most from this move.

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