Wesley Berry Flowers Pt.2 Their SEO Backbone

In Part 1, I discussed Wesley’s “plagiarism, interlinking, and duplicate content” issues. Today, I’m going to cover the backbone of what makes Wesley’s site rank so well.

Wesley Berry has a network of websites that were design for one purpose: to cast link-votes. While this purpose may seem shallow, the sites that are included in the network are actually informative as they are real and useful Directories. I’ve posted several of them here:

• www.localschoolfinder.com/ (PR0; created in 2006; ownership masked)
  
• www.local-worship.com/ (PR0; created in 2006; ownership masked)
  
• www.funeral-homes.net/ (PR0; created in 2001; ownership masked)
  
• www.locateaflorist.net/ (PR0; created in 2005; ownership masked)
  
• www.local-library.com/ (PR0; created in 2006; ownership masked)
  
• www.flowers-nationwide.com/ (PR3; created in 2004; ownership masked)

As you visit the websites above you’ll notice a lot of link-votes being cast to various floral related websites that are all owned by Wesley Berry. While the idea behind this link network scheme is, I think brilliant (because they are real directories), the network has been over used and has since taken on a spammy tone.

In reviewing Google’s PageRank score for these Directories, I think Google has identified the network as spam too because the value of most of the sites have dropped since I first became aware of them three years ago (with the exception of the last link I posted above). While I think that this network no longer provides value to Wesley’s SEO strategies, I think Wesley’s websites are still benefiting from what was.

One of Wesley’s other SEO strategies is to write informative essays and publish them. Some of the essays can be viewed here:

• http://www.thephantomwriters.com/free_content/db/b/flowers-spread-more-cheer.shtml
• http://www.mail-archive.com/thephantomwriters@yahoogroups.com/msg00666.html
  
• http://www.weddingvendors.com/planning/articles/choosing-wedding-flowers/

All the essays written by Wesley are for the most part informative and include link-vote footers like you see here:

This tactic does work but one must be careful to not publish the same essays with various online publishers as Google will ultimately count only one of them. In that regard, I did find Wesley had published the same essays with the same link-votes as that is something that should be avoided. In truth, Google favors original content and duplicate content often gets disgarded.

In conclusion, from what I can tell, Wesley has not employed any new SEO strategies in the last couple years. I also browsed through many of Wesley’s backlinks and could not find any real patterns of old-school paid links. What I find odd about wesleyberryflowers.com’s good ranking related to local florist search terms is that while the site does not break ALL of Google’s webmaster guidelines, it does however stand outside of a good portion of them.

 I am reminded of the imagery of walking on very thin ice.