Local Florist Search - 2006 Roses and Thorns
In 2006, we saw both improvements and disappointments in some popular online resources used to search for local florists. Here's a year-end wrap up, awarding bouquets of roses or thorns.
Roses - For Google's addition of Plus Boxes late in the year. In natural search results, the boxes appear between florists' descriptions/snippets and URLs and expand to show stores' map locations. It's a truly helpful tool for consumers searching for brick and mortar flower shops.
Roses - For sniffing out most doorway pages and subdomain spamming by floral wire service affiliates targeting city keywords - although there are few that have long been sitting at the top of major cities. *cough* New York & Los Angeles *cough*
Thorns - For continuing to allowing some wire service affiliate AdWords advertisers to deceive consumers about their locations by claiming "Florist in CityName" and "CityName's Finest Florist" in ads and for allowing common ownership companies to buy three ads targeting the same search terms. Google's Adwords is a popular and powerful tool for both local florists and affiliate marketers but the deception and fraud by some advertisers continues to damage the image of local florists and flowers as a gift.
Google Local
Roses - For now allowing local companies (including florists) to register their sites online instead of waiting for postcards to be sent in the mail. Since Google Local pulls reviews from Yahoo Local (see note below), CitySearch.com and InsiderPages.com, we do wish there was a way for registered sites to map all the reviews about their companies. At the moment, Google Local seems to pick up the reviews in a hit and miss fashion. They also have a few problems sorting the real brick and mortar stores from the fictitious local florists - although not nearly as badly as does Yahoo Local. We'd love to see a 'report error' link at the bottom of each listing to notify Google Local about miscategorized or duplicate listings, companies that are out of business and scammers gaming buyers by presenting fake local addresses.
Yahoo!
Roses - For Yahoo's natural search results for florists in specific US cities. Overall, the Yahoo team seems to be able to filter out most doorway pages, phony 'local' directories and subdomain spammers.
Yahoo! Local
Thorns - Yahoo! Local could be the trusted, go-to resource for local search for florists but the data and information offered about local flower shops seemed to get worse as the year progressed. We're not sure if the problems can be attributed to bad data provided by YellowPages.com or InfoUSA but the last month has been simply dreadful. Ten days before Christmas, Yahoo! Local placed direct links to affiliate marketer FTD.com under the listings of thousands of local flower shops. That mess was finally cleared up but now Yahoo Local has added non-local order gatherer listings to the first pages of a number of major cities. We're not sure why Exceptional Flowers & Gifts (a Boca Raton, FL company) rates being listed in 53 cities across the US or why 11flowers.com (Flowers and Balloons) gets listed as being located in cities from Cleveland to San Francisco.
One of Yahoo! Local's features is the ability for users to rate local merchants. One successful Tustin CA flower shop has a link right from their shop's home page to their Yahoo Local listing and they encourage customers to rate them. The down side with Yahoo! Local's rating system is that it does not require reviewers/raters to leave comments as to why they like or dislike a particular flower shop. We believe this omission can and does leave local merchants open for abuse without accountability.
MSN
Roses - For generally showing the listings of local flowers shops in city specific queries although MSNs results appear to be the weakest of the three major search engines. On the plus side, their paid ads seem the most easy for searchers to separate from natural results.
Thorns - For MSN's Local Search which displays the same city-wide results regardless of the zip code entered. In cities like Los Angeles, Chicago or New York, results are fairly useless unless a searcher wants to send flowers to the heart of town - but that's no help for folks looking for the closest flower shop in a specific zip.
CitySearch
Thorns - Although the concept of user created reviews and content sounds good, CitySearch - especially 'Best Of CitySearch' polls - appear easily gamed by out-of-state wire service affiliates pretending to be local flower shops. The Audience Winner for Boston, Sunshine Florist, is nothing more than a 'virtual florist' affiliate marketer operated by GiftTree of Vancouver, WA whose site gathers orders destined for Boston, charges a convenience fee, takes a healthy commission and then forwards the flower requests to real local Boston flower shops. Same with the 'Top' Las Vegas 'Audience Winner' and a runner-up in Nashville. With these kinds of sites winning 'local awards', the veracity of CitySearch's entire florist results should be called into question.
CitySearch is also now classifying non-floral companies like Edible Arrangements, cookie bouquet companies and Gift Basket services as 'florists'.
AT&T and Verizon
Thorns - For continuing to sell local phone numbers to affiliate marketers posing as local florists that forward callers to out-of-state and/or out-of-country call centers. Twenty states have now passed legislation prohibiting this practice but once the bad data gets picked up by other Yellow Pages and directory providers it gets recycled, regurgitated and perpetuated, plaguing even more unwitting consumers. These powerful publishing companies have convinced most state legislators that they should not be held responsible for selling bogus local flower shop listings - but they seem happy enough to profit from the sales.
We Real Florists continue to hope the FTC will step in and finally regulate the sale/purchase of these types of phony local florist listings. Much of the bad data on search engines, especially those focusing on local search, can be traced back to this practice.
With respected sources like Wall Street Journal writers recommending consumers buy direct from local florists, here's hoping 2007 will show even more improvement in Search for those seeking real local flower shops.
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This is a great article. You have real put some thought into this post and I hope more get a chance to read this. What a great way to start off the New Year. Keep it comming..
Great post!
We can only hope that the New Year brings the FTC into the mix in a much stronger manner than we have seen in the past and that states that already have rules on the books will move to enforce those rules.
Local search results that continue to send consumers hundreds if not thousands of miles out of their way, and consume in many cases more than 30-50% of their purchase dollars deserve true, honest local results.
Local florists have little hope to compete dollar for dollar with "National" deceptive marketers, and must rely on the accuracy of the search engines and their own abilities to build a web site. The search engines must get over the almighty dollar and work to produce good honest local results, and prove that quality results are more important than money.