My Search Engine

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CHR

CHR

Design matters
Nov 28, 2002
8,951
8,442
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Anaheim
www.avantegardens.com
State / Prov
CA
Google now allows users to create their own search engines by enabling filters and/or choosing preferences. Here's my attempt:

Local Florists and Flower Shops

The results still include AdWords ads since I'm not a 'non-profit' but I've tried to caution users on the home page.

Please give it a whirl and let me know how it looks in your town. I'm especially interested if any OGs show up in the natural results. Please post the search terms and the link to the OG.
 
Nice !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
 
Looks great! I just searched for "Toronto florist" and the top ten all looked like legitimate flower shops in Toronto. Best of all Martins was in the top 3!

There was one other thing I found interesting. As far as I could tell eight of the top ten and the all of the top five were FTD shops.

Of the top five, four referenced FTD on the home page and three featured the FTD logo.
 
Very nice Cathy! Wesleys usually comes up four or five in search results for our town. No where to be seen when I tried it this way!!

:)
 
Mark Anderson said:
As far as I could tell eight of the top ten and the all of the top five were FTD shops.

Of the top five, four referenced FTD on the home page and three featured the FTD logo.
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Purely coincidental, I assure you. I honestly don't believe a WS affiliation (or lack thereof) makes a difference in search positioning.

There may be a slight benefit in being linked from a WS directory like findaflorist.com or FTD's directory but the benefit would be minimal and not nearly enough to lift a listing to the top of search in a major city like Toronto.

Those shops got there based on their own, serious SEO efforts.
 
CHR said:
So the results were primarily showing real florists or trusted florist directories for your city?[/QUO

I did two searches 1-florist Cambridge and 2-florist Cambridge ma
The results were similar in your custom search and a regular google search. The only exception I showed was in the first search switchboard did not show in yours and in the second search findaflorist did not show on yours. In the regular google search they both showed.
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I found out about this a few weeks ago and customized one that searches just my site. It works pretty well if someone is looking for a specific product or web page. check it out! This is something anyone can put on their site to make it more user friendly. http://www.bloominbee.com/
 
I checked out Florist Wellsboro, Pa 16901

The first two listings are a PHONY FLORIST! Call the phone number and get forwarded to a phone bank in N. J. The next listing above our live link is a shop that closed when the owner came down with Leukimia (SP?). We bought their inventory and the building was sold about 2 years ago. Our info is correct and looks good!
 
David -

I've edited out sites where I see the affilliate content results outweighing the real florist listings. I've also omitted directories where the majority of outbound links are for gathering affiliate sales.

The major cities appear to show the biggest differences. See:

My Search: Florist in Houston TX Regular Google Search: Florist in Houston TX

My Search: Florist Charlotte NC Regular Google Search: Florist Charlotte NC

My Search: Florist Boston MA Regular Google Search: Florist Boston MA

I'm getting a lot of InsiderPages.com and Yelp.com results in major cities. Those sites create a page for each flower shop that's been rated. This means a couple things: 1) Their results are trusted by Google 2) If a shop's ratings page places higher than their own store's, then it's past time to work on optimization for the keywords 'florist' or 'flower shop' 3) Better look and see what shoppers are saying about our stores. Anyone that does't like the comments should think honestly about the customers' observations and also consider actively soliciting reviews from their own customers.

Consumers ratings on the web are here to stay and can be found on CitySearch.com, Yahoo Local!, MerchantCircle.com, Yelp.com, InsiderPages.com and a number of the Yellow Page-type sites.
 
Clark -

I think think you are referring to the Google Local results (the three small links above the natural results.) I can't do a thing about those but you can send an email reporting the problems to Google Local: http://maps.google.com/support/bin/request.py

In the natural results, I see a page from discoverourtown.com as the #1 result and your shop's listing is #2. Discoverourtown.com is pretty good at maintaining their data. If Country Owl Florist is closed, I'd do two things:
1) Fill our the form on http://www.discoverourtown.com/ContactPage.php to let them know the store is closed and that your store is in Wellsboro. It's important to let these kinds of sites know of local changes and no one is more qualified than a local business like yours. Don't wait for them to fix errors or omissions on their own. They have tens of thousands of pages and can't keep their sites up by themselves, especially when the listings are free.

2) See if you can buy Country Owl Florists' (or any other defunct shop's) old phones number if they're out of business. :>
 
I've added the customized search to my own shop site. If anyone else would like to use a copy on his/her site and/or would like to help contribute to the results (adding good resources or deleting poor ones) please PM me. I can grant you permissions to edit after a little coaching.

Am dead serious about believing "the best florists are real local florists".

P.S. After looking at the results for 'florist anaheim ca' I need to work a bit on my SEO. ;)
 
Can I do this?

CHR said:
Google now allows users to create their own search engines by enabling filters and/or choosing preferences. Here's my attempt:

Local Florists and Flower Shops

The results still include AdWords ads since I'm not a 'non-profit' but I've tried to caution users on the home page.

Please give it a whirl and let me know how it looks in your town. I'm especially interested if any OGs show up in the natural results. Please post the search terms and the link to the OG.
Click to expand...

Can I do this even if my website is handled by TF? I've signed onto AdWords, but I'm not sure how to do what you are talking about. I'm located in Springfield, Va--are you saying to use Springfield VA Florist at a custom search engine?

Really want to make this work better....
Christi
 
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