"Christmas Flowers" & Filters on FTD.com

As I mentioned earlier, a few days ago the Mercury Man (a.k.a FTD.com) took off sprinting with an aggressive SEO campaign that is designed to rank them for the highly sought phrase “Christmas flowers.”

In an effort to influence their ranking in Google, they arranged to have a couple of handfuls of link-votes cast toward their Christmas page.

However, in their haste they have made some mistakes. For instance, if you visit the first website below you will notice that their newly cast link-vote is in an area identified as being “sponsored.” As is common knowledge among SEOs: you want your link-vote as far away from that word as possible because Google will not count it if it sees that word proceeding it. The other mistake they made is that some of these link-votes are cast on websites that are completely unrelated.

 As a result of these mistakes, Google has already implemented filters on their ranking that will continue to hinder their presence.

	Website	Link-Votes
1	http://www.toddhiestand.com <--the link-vote occurs at the very top of the site. Google discounts link-votes that have been identfied as being Sponsored.	Christmas Flowers
2	http://www.journeyguy.com/	Christmas Flowers
3	http://www.subversiveinfluence.com/wordpress/	Christmas Flowers
4	http://www.minthegap.com/	Christmas Flowers
5	http://inashoe.com/	Christmas Flowers
6	http://ironiccatholic.blogspot.com/	Christmas Flowers
7	http://www.hoei.com/blog/	Christmas Flowers
8	http://www.mattandnancy.org/	Christmas Flowers
9	http://inamirrordimly.com/	Christmas Flowers