Does anyone have any information on the relationship between wire service membership (my website links to the Teleflora catalog)and google positioning?
Does W/S help google position?
- Thread starter janineatmonarch
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Greenie from me for a good question.....I don't think that part of the Wire Service debate has been discussed from that viewpoint.......Google and site rankings with and without WS.
Shoot.....should have been in the Wire services thread....then I could have greenied that.
Shoot.....should have been in the Wire services thread....then I could have greenied that.
Yup, they pay (membership) bucks for effective SEO. It's hard to get your own site listed on top of the TF hosted site, even in a small town so I can only imagine how difficult it is in a large city against all the OGs and local competitors....
I am WS free with my own website and I come up first on a "florist, Waynesfield, Ohio" google search.
I come up on first page in two of the larger town searches I deliver to. Then I come up on the second page of the largest town I am near.
I come up on first page in two of the larger town searches I deliver to. Then I come up on the second page of the largest town I am near.
There is no direct correlation between being in a wire service and Google rankings.
Some things to consider:
Some things to consider:
- If you are linking to Teleflora (or FTD) you are helping them, not them helping you
- Wire Service template sites with default text and without a lot of customization work will be filtered as duplicate content
- Having an independent website doesn't guarantee better rankings on its own - someone still needs to drive the car
- FTD offers paid search listing to their florists through a partnership with Reach Local - this is different than organic SEO
- Wire service florist sites traditionally haven't been great at SEO, but are improving
- Wire service main sites (TF.com, etc) are benefitting somewhat from their high priced SEO consultants, but that only increases the disparity between themselves and their clients
- Most florists don't rank well because they don't try
- Most florists don't get much business from their site because the site is not designed to convert (back to the bit about trying)
Ryan-
I will say one quick thing about our eFlorist sites - I know (at least what I've been told; since I don't do it myself I have to rely on that) that the team DOES work to include as much SEO in the eFlorist sites that they can do on this side.
I do agree that to do the best with search the individual florist shops do need to supplement (or at least work a little more with the eFlorist team) what we do on this end. I was told that many of the shops we work with don't even personalize the About Us page! Though I'm sure everyone here on FC does because they know the value of having great content that the spiders can find local content in to be more highly ranked.
I will say one quick thing about our eFlorist sites - I know (at least what I've been told; since I don't do it myself I have to rely on that) that the team DOES work to include as much SEO in the eFlorist sites that they can do on this side.
I do agree that to do the best with search the individual florist shops do need to supplement (or at least work a little more with the eFlorist team) what we do on this end. I was told that many of the shops we work with don't even personalize the About Us page! Though I'm sure everyone here on FC does because they know the value of having great content that the spiders can find local content in to be more highly ranked.
BOSS
FlowerChat Administrator
Yea...everything Ryan said!!!
They all stuck out to me...especially "If you are linking to Teleflora (or FTD) you are helping them, not them helping you" And the flip side of that, is your hurting yourself!
They all stuck out to me...especially "If you are linking to Teleflora (or FTD) you are helping them, not them helping you" And the flip side of that, is your hurting yourself!
LJVF
Well-Known Member
I think Ryan (Infinite) gave some sound advice.
But I'm not exactly clear on what you are asking. If you are asking if using Teleflora cookie cutter images help your google ranking, I would say no. If you are asking if they help conversions, then that answer is arguable.
But if you are talking the use of a Teleflora template, then my answer would be yes and no.
IMO an independent site that is well maintained and up to date on all the latest SEO will usually rank a florist higher in google then if they went with a wire service template.
However, having an independent site with all the glitter internally and externally does not guarantee it will out rank a competitor who uses a wire service template. There are many mysterious factors that google uses in it's secret formula, which many believe to include content, longevity of the url, quality of backlinks, physical address of the business, etc...
Another thing to keep in mind is how much time are you willing to put into it and/or how much are you willing to pay to have someone maintain your independent site. I believe a generic wire service template will usually beat an average to below average coded independent site that is never updated or maintained at all. At least the wire services have decent default coding and also make basic updates to their clients websites.
So in closing, I believe that the wire service templates can help florists who are not willing to put any effort into SEO, but don't expect miracles.
Remember we're talking search rankings only, conversions are a whole different beast.
We have a landing site (5 pages) hosted by Verizon and when you click on the "Design Gallery" button it takes you to our original designs (several pages) and to the Teleflora catalog (hosted by Teleflora) including a shopping cart and check out. We get a lot of orders from our website and I want to eventually eliminate Teleflora, but am worried that it will change our position on the search engines. Any thoughts?
We have good positioning now on google and yahoo and I am asking if having all the teleflora florist affiliates and the photos of original designs as well as the entire teleflora catalog helps us stay in good position. Any thoughts?
What is your website address? I don't see it in your profile. It sounds like you have a similar set up as the one I made for www.summerlandflowersandgifts.com in which the teleflora site is a link from it? Do your orders come from the teleflora site or your own site?
Nicole, I have seen some evidence of this, though the implementation has often been shoddy (ex: lack of 301s when switching from the ugly parameter URLs to more search-friendly URLs last year creating more dup content, inconsistent use of the new URL structure within sites, poor use of the nofollow tag). I'm hoping that's from an in-house person, not a high-priced consultant.
I do agree that to do the best with search the individual florist shops do need to supplement (or at least work a little more with the eFlorist team) what we do on this end. I was told that many of the shops we work with don't even personalize the About Us page! Though I'm sure everyone here on FC does because they know the value of having great content that the spiders can find local content in to be more highly ranked.
Some examples from testing we've done on eFlorist sites:
- 12,000 florists with the same About Us text
- approx 5,000 florists had their Christmas catalogue indexed by Google (the other 12,000 or so being filtered as dup content)
(numbers are approximated as my coffee is out of reach and it's early morning here)
It's true that florists need to do more with their websites, but the platform can help or hurt as well. A platform built to scale like eFlorist creates duplicate sites - not only in appearance, but in data. You can almost guarantee that every eFlorist site will have the same URL structure and content within each URL:
Ex: Modern Flowers
Ex: Birthday Celebration
Florists need more than a pre-fab solution. If we are going to sell them a fill-in-the-blanks product, we need to make sure the blanks are blank, not pre-filled with the same data as every other client. The SEO folks from TF should know this - if they don't, they should be replaced; if they do, shame on them.
Back To The Original Question
If you have an older domain name and a decent number of links - and you properly manage the transition to a new site you'll likely keep your rankings and possibly even improve.
Ryan
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