Wesley Berry Flowers Pt.2 Their SEO Backbone

In Part 1, I discussed Wesley’s “plagiarism, interlinking, and duplicate content” issues. Today, I’m going to cover the backbone of what makes Wesley’s site rank so well.

Wesley Berry has a network of websites that were design for one purpose: to cast link-votes. While this purpose may seem shallow, the sites that are included in the network are actually informative as they are real and useful Directories. I’ve posted several of them here:

• www.localschoolfinder.com/ (PR0; created in 2006; ownership masked)
  
• www.local-worship.com/ (PR0; created in 2006; ownership masked)
  
• www.funeral-homes.net/ (PR0; created in 2001; ownership masked)
  
• www.locateaflorist.net/ (PR0; created in 2005; ownership masked)
  
• www.local-library.com/ (PR0; created in 2006; ownership masked)
  
• www.flowers-nationwide.com/ (PR3; created in 2004; ownership masked)

As you visit the websites above you’ll notice a lot of link-votes being cast to various floral related websites that are all owned by Wesley Berry. While the idea behind this link network scheme is, I think brilliant (because they are real directories), the network has been over used and has since taken on a spammy tone.

In reviewing Google’s PageRank score for these Directories, I think Google has identified the network as spam too because the value of most of the sites have dropped since I first became aware of them three years ago (with the exception of the last link I posted above). While I think that this network no longer provides value to Wesley’s SEO strategies, I think Wesley’s websites are still benefiting from what was.

One of Wesley’s other SEO strategies is to write informative essays and publish them. Some of the essays can be viewed here:

• http://www.thephantomwriters.com/free_content/db/b/flowers-spread-more-cheer.shtml
• http://www.mail-archive.com/thephantomwriters@yahoogroups.com/msg00666.html
  
• http://www.weddingvendors.com/planning/articles/choosing-wedding-flowers/

All the essays written by Wesley are for the most part informative and include link-vote footers like you see here:

This tactic does work but one must be careful to not publish the same essays with various online publishers as Google will ultimately count only one of them. In that regard, I did find Wesley had published the same essays with the same link-votes as that is something that should be avoided. In truth, Google favors original content and duplicate content often gets disgarded.

In conclusion, from what I can tell, Wesley has not employed any new SEO strategies in the last couple years. I also browsed through many of Wesley’s backlinks and could not find any real patterns of old-school paid links. What I find odd about wesleyberryflowers.com’s good ranking related to local florist search terms is that while the site does not break ALL of Google’s webmaster guidelines, it does however stand outside of a good portion of them.

 I am reminded of the imagery of walking on very thin ice. 

Wesley Berry Flowers - Plagiarism - Interlinking - Duplicate Content Pt.1

I’ve always had a special eye for Wesley Berry Flowers since their early days on the internet. I remember several years ago when they first came on the scene they were heavy into Pay-Per-Clicks. At about that time I had floral website that was ranking quite good and doing well in the organic results.

One day I decided to run a long tail search query into Google that I thought would only bring up my flower website. What I found was rather interesting as Google produced two websites that day: one was mine; the other was Wesley’s. 

Low and behold I had just discovered that Wesley Berry Flowers had plagiarized what I had written for my own website’s homepage key-language. At first I was a little upset that they would copy me, but since that time I’ve found it humorous in an odd way. After all, now I’ve got platform to expose it.

Any way, even though Wesley Berry Flowers is a national order gatherer, their focus is to place good in the search results on the local scale. Instead of attempting to rank for general terms like “flowers,” they are opting to rank for local searches like “Los Angeles, ca florist” etc. By attempting to rank for every single City/Town and ZIP Code in the United States using that method, I doubt there are any florists who haven’t yet heard of Wesley Berry Flowers.

Moving forward, Wesley Berry has many websites that are on similar templates so unless one is frequently looking at the address bar you probably wouldn’t realize that you’re bouncing from one site to the next. In Google’s eyes, they frown on interlinking between like-minded sites that are owned by the same person because there is often duplicate content associated with it, which there definitely is on Wesley’s sites.

Google typically likes original content so I’m a little surprised that Wesley’s money maker website (i.e. wesleyberryflowers.com) is doing so well despite all the interlinking. Back in early 2007, roses-nationwide.com was fatally hit by a Google penalty in this regard and as far as I can see, there is (or was) little difference between the two. It’s only a matter of time until wesleyberryflowers.com experiences the same fate. 

Part 2 will be posted shortly.