FTD.com & FTDSUCKS.com

FTD.....in an effort to control their online reputation, just days ago bought FTDSUCKS.com. For those that may not know, FTDSUCKS.com was a rant website where users could submit their complaint stories. Over the last couple of years I have observed ftdsucks.com getting more search exposure.

Any way, what is a little humorous to me, is that they masked the FTDSUCKS.com domain over FTD.com instead of killing the domain. To see what I mean, go ahead and click here www.ftdsucks.com

Proof of registry. From the WhoIs database:

Registrant:
FTD Inc
3113 woodcreek Drive
Downers Grove, IL 60515
US

Domain Name: FTDSUCKS.COM

Administrative Contact, Technical Contact:
FTD Inc
3113 woodcreek Drive
Downers Grove, IL 60515
US
630-724-6673

Record expires on 04-Aug-2010.
Record created on 06-Oct-2004.
Database last updated on 22-Oct-2009 23:11:26 EDT.

Domain servers in listed order:

NS1.FTDI.COM 208.13.72.9
NS2.FTDI.COM 208.49.170.8

Incontent Link Showing in Google Search

I'm noticing new incontent links appearing in the snippet area of Google search. I ran a search query for "seo marketing" and the 2nd organic result is showing an incontent link in the snippet area:

A click on the link will take you to the same main result page but will jump you to the exact paragraph that Google thinks you are looking for (similar to site links, but a little different because it is in the snippet area).

It appears that Google is doing some testing on this feature for future use as it is selectively appearing for various searches.

New Restrictions on FTD's FOL Websites

On September 1st, a new restriction for FOL florists emerged in the administration area of the FOL portal related to updating text on the homepage of YOUR website.

In that regard, after you attempt an update you will get this:

"The Content you've requested requires support assistance. Please contact FOL support at 800-576-6721."

After calling the number I spoke with a FTD FOL rep. by the name of "Muigel" who told me that FTD must now manually approve update requests due to recent "federal rules and regulations that have been put in place."

Your comments are welcome.....

1800Flowers At Proflowers.Com?

Interesting, today I performed a "site" command on Proflowers.com and lo and behold a page from Proflowers on Martha Stewart with information about "delivery to your door from 1800flowers" populated. Check it out:

Now either 1800flowers is partnering with Proflowers, or Proflowers is trying to brand rank in Google for both Martha Stewart and 1800flowers.com. If it is the latter and not the former, I'd say Proflowers is going to be in hot water.

Teleflora: Now Offering "Cheap Flower Arrangements"

Teleflora is now engaging in competitive price point marketing in an effort to compete with Proflowers and FTD.com. Their marketing strategy is to offer product at $19.99 as displayed in their Adwords campaign:

According to the landing page, if you are looking for "cheap flower arrangements," then their your florist of choice.

I've circled in "red" below the promotion price of $19.99. At present, this marketing strategy seems to be only offered via a click on their Adword campaign and is not available by way of directly going to Teleflora.com. This implies they are testing the water.

Google Adwords Testing through Proflowers

Last week, WebProNews reported that:

"Google started inviting advertisers to participate in a beta program late last week. According to an email, product ads will appear in the Sponsored Links section and "complement" standard text ads."

Looks like Proflowers is now apart of this program. Below you'll notice a "plus" symbol that appears directly in the advertisement:

After clicking the symbol a field then populates with product imagery which pushes the number 1 ranking website down quite a bit.

At present, this new way of advertising seems to be only tied to general floral searches. I have not yet noticed it showing for local searches.

PageRank Sculpting

Interesting interview of Stephen Spencer (of Netconcepts) on PageRank sculpting by Mike McDonald of WebProsNews.com. For those who may not know, Googler Matt Cutts dropped a bomb at the SMX expo in Seattle on how Google will handle PageRank flows in the future. Click here if the video below doesn't play.

More WebProNews Videos

While all the major floral players currently do a little PageRank sculpting, as do the wire-service hosted websites (FOL & EFlorist), I don't think the overall impact will be felt much.

-Just my opinion.

Yahoo Search Ranking Changes Scheduled Tonight

Yahoo issued another algorithm forcast today:

Weather Report: Yahoo! Search Index Update

We’re rolling out some updates to our crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms over the next few days. During this process, you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index.

BING.Com MTV Movie Awards 2008??

With all the hype in the last 24 hours regarding Microsoft's new Decision Search Engine, I decided to stay up late and try it out before most of the world woke up to it in the morning. Within minutes of the announcement, I realized I wasn't the only one up late for it. In fact, Google's own Matt Cutts was already engaged with Bing on Twitter about it. 

In their exchange, @Bing asked Matt to type "mtv movie awards 2009" so he did......and what populated was a 2008 search result: 

Matt then pointed out that Google correctly populates a 2009 result. This exchange was of course a little humorous to me since I witnessed Bing inviting Matt to the experiment,  which immediately went sour. But it got me thinking, if it is inferior here, it's probably inferior in a lot of other searches.

To add insult to injury, as of this writing, "MTV Movie Awards" is trending in real-time on Twitter.

PageRank Update May 27th 2009

There has been a Google PageRank update that just happened 7:45pm. Check all your websites!! 

The Future of FlowerComplaint.com: SEO & Twitter

My little side project with flowercomplaint.com is working out better than expected. Google's year long aging factor has had minimal effect on its web-presence due to the lack of competition regarding its focus. Currently flowercomplaint.com ranks on the 1st page of Google for all the following searches:

1800flowers complaints

Proflowers complaints

FTD complaints

Teleflora complaints

Justflowers complaints

Wesley Berry flowers complaints

In an effort to build user content for the website while the domain ages in authority, I've utilized the social media outlet Twitter and have created a flower complaint account. In the past 4 days, I've uploaded 55 complaints that have come through both Google and Twitter.

As time moves forward I'm going to take all the holiday complaints and upload them on to their own page. The idea behind that is to rank the holiday page for that particular holiday. For instance, next year for Mother's Day you can expect to see flowercomplaint.com in the top 10 for "Mother's Day flowers" searches (unfortunately, I don't believe that flowercomplaint.com will have harnessed enough domain authority in time to rank for Thanksgiving or Christmas, but maybe for Valentines Day searches).

A couple of days ago 1800flowers criticized my effort to build user content for my own gains, but let me state for the record that I make nothing from flowercomplaint.com. In fact, it costs me money. Perhaps some day that may change, but right now it is 100% percent expense out of my own pocket. The gain is not my own, rather the gain is in giving some of the real paying customers of 1800flowers/Proflowers/Justflowers/Teleflora/WesleyBerry a platform of high visibility.

The complaints posted on flowercomplaint.com are real-customer experiences.....and there is a demand for a place to go and tell of their experience. Flowercomplaint.com provides that platform within a positive outlook for our industry: "Tell others of your experience - Only you can shape and refine the future of the floral industry!"

I think Teleflora and 1800flowers now see that there is a demand for such a website, as they have both asked for me to help them connect with some of the posters. In that regard, I've recently added text in red font to their complaint pages requesting that the poster add their order number to the complaint.

I'll work with these major floral companies the best I can, but their future hangs in the balance of their past customers who want to connect with potential future customers. 

I'm just the middleman :-)

Mother's Day Aftermath

I hope all you local florists had a successful Mother's Day!! Special shout going out to my favorite florist in Saint Louis! It's going to take me a while to recover so I'm probably only going to be able to tweet posts for the next few days.

I've been on the design table for 5 days with little sleep. I'm sure many of you florists can identify with that.

Sleep well.

P.S. Of interest, I've got a list of emails to upload to my Flower Complaint website (too tired to post them now). I'm sure that list is going to build over the next few days.

Teleflora's Mother's Day Commercial on All EFlorist Websites

I like the new Teleflora Mother's Day commercial, but I'm not sure how I feel about Teleflora uploading their commercial on to the entire fleet of their Eflorist websites. Yes, that's right, yesterday Teleflora uploaded their commercial to every hosted Teleflora website. If you OWN a domain that has a Teleflora hosted template, you'll see it on YOUR website.

Google Does Forgive: "Reconsideration Request"

Yesterday Google published an interesting video on "reconsideration requests." For those of you who don't know, a reconsideration request is for websites that have been penalized. In that regard, websites are often penalized for artificially manipulating Google's algorithm. 

The moral of the story below.....is that if your website has been penalized you must come clean with everything you did (in detail)....ask for forgiveness.....and promise to never do it again.

The frustrating thing about a Google penalty, is that Google does not tell you if your website has been penalized, nor will they inform you of why your website was penalized. It is up to you to spill your guts.....and hope that Google here's you. So if you ever find yourself submitting a "reconsideration request," think of it as a prayer.

In some cases, it appears to work.

Mother[']s Day:To Optimize With or Without the Apostrophe

I was just looking over last year's search stats (2008) for a floral website that I run that ranked in the top 5 results (in Google) for all of the following keywords. Of interest in that regard, is the search volume difference between the use or non use of the apostrophe.

These stats represent the 5 days leading up to Mother's Day. 

Keyword	Visits	% visits
mothers day flowers	2,366	44.69%
mother's day flowers	1,585	29.94%
flowers for mothers day	427	8.07%
flowers for mother's day	158	2.98%
flowers mothers day	84	1.59%

"SEO Marketing" Showing in Local Results

Local search has worked it's way over to the SEO field for the first time today. A search on "seo marketing" will now yield local results below the top ranking websites.  

It hasn't yet carried over to search phrases like "SEO" or "SEO company" or "SEO firm" but I'm sure it will.  I find it particularly intriguing that "SEO marketing" is given special value as the 1st to include local search among other SEO terms.

Have you ever heard of MajesticSEO.com?

MajesticSEO.com offers some great free tools on website backlink discovery as it pertains to charting link-vote activity over long periods of time. Of interest, if we apply this tool to FTD, 1800flowers, Proflowers, and Teleflora, we can see each floral company’s offsite SEO push at different stages. In the graph below, highlighted in blue, we see that FTD made a huge push in late 2007 thru early 2008. 

Color codes below: FTD, 1800flowers, Proflowers, & Teleflora

Check out the tool here

SEMRush.com

Have you ever heard of SEM Rush? If not, SEM Rush is a great competitive research tool that can be used to peer into the search volumes of websites other than your own. Of interest in that regard, are the monthly averages of the major floral players:

Teleflora.com - 300.3k a month

Proflowers.com - 755.0k a month

FTD.com - 851.0k a month

1800flowers.com 2680.0k a month

I have a handful of tools that I use everyday, and SEM Rush is counted among them. 

Have fun with it!

Multiple Brands Experience "Sitelinks" at Once

Just days ago I blogged about Google running an IP-based local algorithm within general search for single keywords like "flowers" and "florist" etc...  As we saw in that post, Google is now ranking 3 brand websites followed by a local IP-based 10 pack. As I mentioned back then, this is a breakthough for local business exposure as it now evens the search field.

Fast forward to today, and now Google has implemented another feature called "sitelinks" to their brand ranking process. Yes, sitelinks are nothing new as they have always been reserved for the top ranking website only (not all top ranking websites can generate them) as we see in this example:

But now Google is giving the top 3 brand rankers all "sitelinks" at once for the keyword "flowers:" 

Google PageRank Update April 1st

There was a PageRank update today. Not much to report as far as the major players are concerned. The only real difference is that Google removed FlowerPetal's apparent penalty reduction that happend back in Feb. and reinstated it to a PR5.

The following chart covers the last 5 updates. 

PageRank Prior to Sept. 27th 2008	PageRank Update Sept. 28th 2008	PageRank Update Dec. 30th 2008	PageRank Update Feb. 28th 2009	PageRank Update April 1st 2009
FTD PR7	FTD PR6	FTD PR6	FTD PR6	FTD PR6
Proflowers PR6	Proflowers PR6	Proflowers PR6	Proflowers PR6	Proflowers PR6
1800flowers PR7	1800flowers PR7	1800flowers PR7	1800flowers PR7	1800flowers PR7
Teleflora N/A	Teleflora N/A	Teleflora PR6	Teleflora PR6	Teleflora PR6
Justflowers N/A	Justflowers N/A	Justflowers N/A	Justflowers PR4	Justflowers PR4
Flowerpetal PR4	FlowerPetal PR5	Flowerpetal PR5	FlowerPetal PR2	FlowerPetal PR5
Wesleyberry flowers.com PR7	Wesleyberry flowers.com PR5	Wesleyberry flowers.com PR5	Wesleyberry flowers.com PR4	Wesleyberry flowers.com PR4

Local Algorithm Showing within General Search

It looks like Google has rolled out an algorithm where a local algorithm is now being shown within general search terms. For instance, ever since the recent brand ranking algorithm was implemented in January the top 4 floral companies have seemingly appeared secure in their dominance for many general floral keywords like “flowers,” "flower delivery," “florist,” etc…

Fast forward to today, and it looks like Google is now attempted to aid mom & pop shops. Here is a search on the keyword "flowers:"

I live in California so it appears Google is reading my IP address and populating local results in apropos. However, if I click on “change location” above the local algorithm is removed and replaced with a field box with the option to enter a new location. So if I wanted to locate a particular Baltimore Florist or just look for funeral flowers in a particular area, I would change the field box to populate that areas florists. This is a different from the usual text in the upper right corner that says: "Customized based on recent search activity." In that circumstance, a simple refresh removes the customization. But this in not the case in the new algorithm, you actually have to physically click "change location."

Also, the local listings seem to be from areas *near* my IP address location but not directly *in* my IP address area. If Google could just perfect that element to populate truer local listings this algorithm will be a breakthrough in favor for the local florist.

March Yahoo Algorithm Update

While there hasn't been a weather report released by Yahoo as of yet regarding an algorithm update, I am seeing changes in how they pull results.

Check your rankings.

Cut Flower Commission & TaxPayer Money

Hot off the press regarding California's Cut Flower Commission and use of taxpayer money. Source is cited at the bottom: 

On The Money: Cut Flowers

SACRAMENTO (CBS13)

Its a business with a more than $10 billion dollar impact on the state! 

Flowers, and many of the buds you buy are grown here in California. The largest growers actually have to pay the state to do business in the form of fees to an agency called the Cut Flower Commission. In fact, the commission runs of those fees, as well as federal grants paid by your income taxes.  Critics say Governor Schwarzenegger has told all state agencies to cut travel costs and since the commission is a state agency they, too, should watch what they're spending. 

So we wanted to know what the Cut Flower Commission spent on travel and found a lot of money spent on things that had nothing to do with flowers. 

Kasey Cronquist holds the title of Executive Director - and Ambassador - for the commission. While they have a Sacramento address, Cronquist is based in Carpinteria, California. He spent thousands in travel last year, travelling all over the country, from Salt Lake City to Cleveland to Washington, D.C. He even made a trip to Bogota, Columbia. 

Nearly every time he's come to Sacramento, he's stayed right across the street from the capitol at the Hyatt, spending upwards of $120 or more a night. 

Nearly every time he leaves town Kronquist stays at expensive hotels like a Radisson or the Fairmont in Washington, D.C. He's paid $7.00 per bottle for water; charged up to $60 for laundry; ordered room service nearly every time he stays in a hotel; hit the mini bar; and charged hundreds of dollars for fancy dinners every time he's out of town. 

They seem to be wasting fee payers revenue, says Jon Coupal, president of the watchdog group the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association. He says they're spending money every trip for things that are quite purely fluff. 

Coupal says at a time when state agencies are being asked to make cuts, the commission is spending too much. 

Whether its a non-profit or a government entity people need to understand they have a fiduciary obligation to the people who pay the bills, says Coupal. 

Kasey Cronquist refused to speak about his expenses on-camera, but told CBS-13s Sam Shane that he believes all the expenses are acceptable. He sent us this statement: 

...room service meals and the occasional snack or bottle of water from the mini-bar are expenses that I'm confident any frequent business traveler would find reasonable. 

He also adds that "We are passionate about what we do and all our travel takes place to help ensure a positive business environment for our growers to thrive." 

But critics like Jon Coupal say it doesn't take cross-country travel for the flower business to grow. There's still no concerted effort to look at the expenditure side, says Coupal, and see if Californians are getting the best value for their dollar and quite frankly, they're not!

Source: CBS13

Teleflora Link Bait SuperBowl Video

A recent blog post over on SEOmoz about Comedy Central's use of video link bait reminded me of a similar situation where the SEO for Teleflora.com embedded their SuperBowl Ad with text links aimed at ranking the giant for "flowers," "florists," and "flower delivery".... 

Notice the blue font text links above. The SEO for Teleflora is hoping that bloggers will do as I just did and post it. As more and more bloggers post the video Google begins to credit Teleflora to rank better for those terms. 

Unfortunatly, in order to tell of this, I had to post the video.

Update: I replaced the live link bait with an image of it. I was just educated by my wife on the Fn + PrtSc key.

FlowerComplaint.Com Debut

I've been working on a little website project and I think it is ready for its debut even though I'm still tweaking things.

The website is www.flowercomplaint.com . Respondents can instantly upload floral pictures via email or mobile device to the appropriate company category e.g. Proflowers, FTD, 1800flowers, Teleflora, Justflowers.

For those of you in the floral industry the website may strike you in an odd way but rest assured the intent of the website is to give people a place to vent of their floral experience within the context of a positive outlook for our industry. 

The slogan: "Only You Can Shape & Refine the Future of the Floral Industry!"

The idea for flowercomplaint.com was born right out of Google's Analytics tracking for Florist SEO Watch. Yes, that's right, I decided to create flowercomplaint.com based on how some people are reaching this blog through search. So desperate are some people to vent of their negative floral experience that they either contact me directly or look within this blog for the floral company that messed up.....and comment thereat where the context of my post doesn't match their complaint. Now they've got a place to express their frustrations.

Over time as more and more user content gets added to the website I'll be giving well-written substantial complaints their own page in an effort to make it difficult for the major floral players to perform reputation management on flowercomplaint.com.  

I'm also going to try to incorporate related news pieces as they become available before the holidays.

Any way, the site is brand new and a project in motion. Feel free to express your view of the site and any ideas you may have to help better it. Or, if you think it's not a good idea, take your complaint over to flowercomplaint.com!! (just kidding)

February Search Engine Market Shares

ComScore just released stats related to search engine market shares. No surpise, Google is up 0.3 over the previous month:

February 2009 U.S. Core Search RankingsGoogle Sites led the U.S. core search market in February with 63.3 percent of the searches conducted, followed by Yahoo! Sites (20.6 percent), Microsoft Sites (8.2 percent), Ask Network (4.1 percent) and AOL LLC (3.9 percent).

Full report can be read here. 

Matt Cutts on Brand Ranking: "Vince's Change"

Matt Cutts seems to down play the significance of the new "brand" algorithm and brushes it off as one of "Vince's changes" in the following video. The tone in the video is such that the change is not as significant as SEOs are making it out to be. The problem with Cutts' commentary, is that the facts DO suggest that the change is significant, and top Google engineers like Eric Schmidt have expressed in the past that Google will be headed in a brand ranking direction. 

Local Florist PPC vs SEO Pricing

As we move forward into this tight economy, marketing analysts are predicting that PPC will continue to decline while SEO continues to rise. Media Post News is reporting that:

"Search Marketing Trends: Back to Basics," suggests that growth will decline for paid search from 15.9% in 2009 to 11.3% in 2013--while SEO growth will jump from 17.7% to 20.3%, respectively. (see full report)

When local brick and mortar florists inquiry with me on how much I charge to SEO their site, the first place I go is Google's Traffic Estimator to help me get a value read on what would be their most primary keyword combination for their area. In every case, my cost is pennies compared to what the PPC is running for that same phrase (which is of course tallied from competitive bids).

While most SEOs price based on full court optimization, my pricing for local florists is based on a keyword basis (which is priced against search volume and competition levels) because I know that full court optimization FOR THE LOCAL FLORIST (only) is not worth the cost. Other SEOs may think I'm crazy in saying that, but it is true for the local florist industry. How do I know that? Because I am a real-florist (who is aware of real-florist budgets) with SEO knowledge.

For instance, if you had a shop in say Houston Tx....why pay an SEO for a full court SEO job to rank your website for multiple keywords....which would include keywords like "Houston flower delivery" when only 1 search a day is performed on that phrase; or for "Houston funeral flowers" when zilch ("o") searches are performed on it. 

It would make much better sense to pay an SEO to focus on ranking your website for just "Houston flowers" as roughly 200 searches are perform on that phrase each and everyday (and price it out according to that search volume). By concentrating on one or two primary keyphrases it keeps the SEO cost down for you, and ultimately pays off in the same way a full court optimization would. After all, you would be ranking for what the bulk of people are actually searching for any way. Of course, if you are in area where you serve multiple large cities (and there is a search volume present), you'd want rank for those cities too.

To give you a better example of a PPC to SEO comparison (which applies to my service only), let's look further at the search term "Houston flowers." Google's Traffic Estimator indicates that it costs an average of $720 - $1,170 a day to rank in the top 3 Sponsored Ads for that particular search. Yes, that's a day!! My cost, $450 a month for a top 5 organic ranking. 

If you are in a smaller populated area with less search volume my cost would be that much less. Many of my florist clients are paying as little as $300 a month for search volumes that are averaging 4,500 searches a month.  If you are in area where search volumes are even less, my pricing will be priced off the volume of searches for your area.

Any way, that's how it works. 

Take your phone book budget and replace it with SEO. There's a reason those books are getting smaller.

  

PageRank Update February 28th

As some of you know, Google updates their PageRank meter once every three months or so*. In an effort to document changes in PageRank values for the major floral players as the updates happen, I've created a table.  I'll be posting an updated version of this table after every PageRank update. The latest update occurred on Feb. 28th with the most noteable change going to FlowerPetal.com. 

I started keeping track of when updates occurred on the Sept. 28th 2008 update... 

PageRank Prior to Sept. 27th 2008	PageRank Update Sept. 28th 2008	PageRank Update Dec. 30th 2008	PageRank Update Feb. 28th 2009
FTD PR7	FTD PR6	FTD PR6	FTD PR6
Proflowers PR6	Proflowers PR6	Proflowers PR6	Proflowers PR6
1800flowers PR7	1800flowers PR7	1800flowers PR7	1800flowers PR7
Teleflora ?	Teleflora ?	Teleflora PR6	Teleflora PR6
Justflowers ?	Justflowers ?	Justflowers ?	Justflowers PR4
Flowerpetal PR4	FlowerPetal PR5	Flowerpetal PR5	FlowerPetal PR2
Wesleyberry flowers.com PR7	Wesleyberry flowers.com PR5	Wesleyberry flowers.com PR5	Wesleyberry flowers.com PR4

*While it is true that the PageRank meter is updated once every three months or so, there are times when a real-time PageRank update is imposed on a specific website usually for a negative purpose.

Note: This most recent update has caused much discussion in the SEO world because it was hardly noticed compared to other updates. While some SEOs have labelled it a glitch....as we see above some websites have changed. So I'm treating it like a PageRank update.