Why isn't my KML feed working with Google Maps anymore?

Question

I'm really confused.

I have a KML feed at https://views.scraperwiki.com/run/hackney_council_planning_kml_output/?

...Which worked perfectly fine with Google Maps up until a few weeks ago:

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=https://views.scraperwiki.com/run/hackney_council_planning_kml_output/?

Now it gives me a "file not found" error. The feed validates fine:

http://feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fviews.scraperwiki.com%2Frun%2Fhackney_council_planning_kml_output%2F

...Any idea what might be causing this to not work?

Many thanks!

Answer 1

Unfortunately, Google's maps bot started reading some of our dynamic KML URLs dozens of times per second. I have no idea why. The dynamic views part of ScraperWiki doesn't scale at the moment, so it was harming other services.

Meanwhile, we've disabled it so that Google's bot can't query those URLs any more.

How dynamic is your KML feed? i.e. if we had a way of you creating a static file, would that be good enough?

Answer 2

What mime type are you using for the KML Feed? The KML mime type is

application/vnd.google-earth.kml+xml

For KMZ:

application/vnd.google-earth.kmz

You can find more information here: https://developers.google.com/kml/documentation/kml_tut#kml_server