FTD.Com Moving to 2nd for "Flowers" in Google

United Online's recent acquisition of FTD.Com is providing a boost in the search results for the floral giant. For the last year or so FTD.com has ranked in the 3rd spot in Google for the keyword "flowers" but has since moved to the 2nd spot. 

Why the shift? Well, in all probability, it is because United Online recently placed text links to FTD.com on all of their major brand websites: 

1. United Online (PR6)
2. Classmates.com (PR6)
3. MyPoints (PR6)
4. Netzero (PR7), 
5. Juno (PR6)
6. MySite (PR7) 

All of these brand name websites are deemed authoritative by Google and hence, carry significant weight as a link-vote. Since all these new link-votes are being cast at the same time the noise level is quite loud at FTD.com. The result is that FTD.com gets pushed up in the search results.

What is interesting is that all of United Online's brand websites are naively interlinked with each other with the exception of FTD.com. It appears the SEO's for FTD.com know that if FTD.com were to link back to the other brand websites the link-votes would devalue for them. At over 50,000 search queries a day for the keyword "flowers," the stakes are high.

Any way, at the time of this writing FTD's ranking is still fluid between 2nd & 3rd. It is fluid because the link-votes have not yet solidified into Google's algorithm. 

[As a side note, I find it funny that Google crawled Proflowers at the wrong time and returned the word "Sorry!" for their title tag. Kind of symbolic. The meta-description doesn't make the company look so hot either: "Ships a large variety of unarranged bouquets".Both the title & description tags should be both catchy & and a call to action.]