LaRose.com - #9 Thanksgiving Flowers

Coming in at #9 in Google for “Thanksgiving flowers” is a page from Larose.com

Order Thanksgiving Flowers and Gifts

Order Thanksgiving Flowers - Click Photo To View Details and Order ... Send Thanksgiving Flowers and Gifts at LAROSE.COM the online florist and gift shop, ...
www.larose.com/thanksgiving_flowers_and_gifts/ - 42k - Cached - Similar pages

Their Google PageRank value score is a “0” on their Thanksgiving page which may raise an eyebrow as to why they are ranking on the first page. But let’s look at some possible reasons why they do rank:

1. The age of the domain gives it an advantage. It was first indexed in 1996.
2. It is listed in the DMOZ Directory (though there is now debate as to its current value in SEO)
3. The DMOZ directory has 302 websites listed that are linking to the core domain which is very unusual for a regular flower shop. To give you comparison, the multi-million dollar company Proflowers.com has only 58 DMOZ backlinks.
4. It is listed in the Yahoo Directory (though like DMOZ, there is now debate as to its current value in SEO)
5. Their core domain has over 700 backlinks pointing to it which may be helping this particular page extension to rank.
6. Some of the backlinks come from .gov websites like www.house.gov (PR8) on this extension (which, btw, looks shady for a .gov extension)

My reflection after browsing through a couple of handful of pages on their website is that I got the feeling that they may have been into optimizing their website many years back but have since neglected that effort. In that regard, some of the pages look a little spammy near the bottom which may be hindering their ranking here in 2008.

Whatever the case, my guess is that this site has been stripped of the type of authority is used to have as LaRose.com should have more PageRank authority than it currently does.

The door is open to easily out rank them.