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