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.