Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Teleflora & Super Bowl XLIII

In conjunction with Teleflora’s recent announcement that it will premiere a commercial during Super Bowl XLIII to boost public awareness of local Teleflora member florists, Teleflora today released an SEO laced news release focused on influencing Google’s algorithm to favor Teleflora.com for searches on “flowers” and “florists” and other floral search phrases.

According to the release, the intent of the commercial is:

"Our main priority has always been to support our member florists [hyperlink to Teleflora.com removed] and during these hard economic times, Teleflora wants to help our members generate sales and foot traffic into their shops," said Shawn Weidmann, President, Teleflora. "The opportunity to reach 90 million potential buyers less than two weeks before Valentine's Day - one of the largest flower [hyperlink to Teleflora.com removed] buying holidays - is something that couldn't be passed up."

However, when looking beneath the words of the release through an SEO lens, it is discovered that the intent here is to rank Teleflora.com for popular search phrases and not their local florist directory FindaFlorist.com.

One would think that if Teleflora was really serious about generating public awareness for local florist members, they would also want to help rank their local florist directory FindaFlorist.com for popular search queries. Instead, we see Teleflora only interested in ranking Teleflora.com.

Note: In the image above the red areas are where Teleflora.com cast link-votes toward their website in an effort to rank in Google for those words.  

Actual news release can be found at: sev.prnewswire.com/retail/20090113/LA5845013012009-1.html

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