Wesley Berry Flowers - Plagiarism - Interlinking - Duplicate Content Pt.1

I’ve always had a special eye for Wesley Berry Flowers since their early days on the internet. I remember several years ago when they first came on the scene they were heavy into Pay-Per-Clicks. At about that time I had floral website that was ranking quite good and doing well in the organic results.

One day I decided to run a long tail search query into Google that I thought would only bring up my flower website. What I found was rather interesting as Google produced two websites that day: one was mine; the other was Wesley’s. 

Low and behold I had just discovered that Wesley Berry Flowers had plagiarized what I had written for my own website’s homepage key-language. At first I was a little upset that they would copy me, but since that time I’ve found it humorous in an odd way. After all, now I’ve got platform to expose it.

Any way, even though Wesley Berry Flowers is a national order gatherer, their focus is to place good in the search results on the local scale. Instead of attempting to rank for general terms like “flowers,” they are opting to rank for local searches like “Los Angeles, ca florist” etc. By attempting to rank for every single City/Town and ZIP Code in the United States using that method, I doubt there are any florists who haven’t yet heard of Wesley Berry Flowers.

Moving forward, Wesley Berry has many websites that are on similar templates so unless one is frequently looking at the address bar you probably wouldn’t realize that you’re bouncing from one site to the next. In Google’s eyes, they frown on interlinking between like-minded sites that are owned by the same person because there is often duplicate content associated with it, which there definitely is on Wesley’s sites.

Google typically likes original content so I’m a little surprised that Wesley’s money maker website (i.e. wesleyberryflowers.com) is doing so well despite all the interlinking. Back in early 2007, roses-nationwide.com was fatally hit by a Google penalty in this regard and as far as I can see, there is (or was) little difference between the two. It’s only a matter of time until wesleyberryflowers.com experiences the same fate. 

Part 2 will be posted shortly.