Florists Get into Trouble for Gaming Google with the Mother’s Day Flowers Keyword Phrase

Leading up to Mother’s Day every year, “mother’s day flowers” happens to be one of the most sought-after Google search phrases in the land. Since Google’s first page of search results happens to be the place where most business is made or lost, florists around the country have been doing their best to be featured there. And often they use search engine optimization techniques that could hardly be called fair.

What online florists like Teleflora and ProFlowers have been doing is, they’ve been paying owners of other websites to place links (not advertisements) on their websites, to these online florists. While placing paid advertisements on other people’s websites is completely legal, paying to place the links there is quite illegal by the rules Google and all other major search engines practice.

One of the several ways that Google has of determining if a website is important is by checking to see if there are lots of other websites on the Internet that happen to link to the website they are studying. So if there are 10,000 websites on the Internet that have links to TeleFlora, Google thinks, “Gee, there all these websites that think TeleFlora is so important they’ll just place links all over; in fact, they’ll link words that say “mother’s day flowers” to TeleFlora for free. If this doesn’t show that Teleflora is important, I don’t know what does”. At least, that’s how Google would think if it were a person.

Apparently, the New York Times put together a set of thousands of websites that have such paid links and ratted these florist companies out to Google to see what they would do. Google looked them over and said that their algorithm was sophisticated enough to see that these florists were trying to game it. And that they were on top of it.

But the New York Times thinks that Google is just saying that to save face. Those florist websites did gain quite a bit, gaming Google with the “Mother’s Day flowers” paid links.

Google probably doesn’t know what to do when there’s something like this that happens. If Google sends the florists that are in violation of its rules into the sandbox, which would actually be a spot on the second or third page of Google’s results that no one would ever bother with, no one would find these popular florists and they would get disgusted with Google and turn to other search engines and tell themselves that Google wasn’t as good as it used to be. Google can’t catch a break.