Interflora SEO Spam?
So I would have thought the brand Interflora would have learned from it’s Google slap just over a year ago. Although that was the UK version of Interflora. It seems either that Interflora Australia is now engaging in backlink spam or someone is certainly trying to make it look like they are.
SEO Spam Clues
Here’s what I’m seeing. Interflora has all of a sudden jumped into the top positions for the phrase “gift baskets” . With a little bit of digging using the majesticseo.com tool I’m seeing new links with the anchor text “gift baskets”. It’s a little odd as most SEOs these days if they are going to do some sort of paid backlinking campaign will avoid using exact match anchor text. Digging a little deeper I went and checked out some of these links. The first was from a site called ninepearls.com which has a lifestyle, technology, entertainment and health sections. Ninepearls of course has a private registration which is also pretty common with sites that sell backlinks. This first article can be found at ninepearls index.php/picking-the-best-christmas-presents/ . I’ve deliberately broken that link. The article contains such advice as “Customization and originality will be determining for the manner in which your present is received” What does that even mean? I think that was written by poor old Ahmed. Let’s leave the quality of the article aside for the moment. Maybe the site is just a low quality mag that wanted to link directly to www.interflora.com.au /christmas-hampers here in Australia because they could not find any other example on the web to link to. Well who wrote this? Veronica Narducci apparently. A quick Google search reveals though that Veronica is also Claudia.
I think the real person is actually Claudia as she runs a blog about Fragile X which is a type of autism. Maybe she also makes extra cash running ninepearls.com but I doubt it as on the fragile X site she specifically says not to approach her about endorsing products and is up front about advertising.
So Interflora is getting what seems to be a paid backlink from a site that seems to have pinched the photo of someone that runs a blog on autism. That’s kinda uncool.
Next we come to lsedz.com which has a very similar layout and feel to ninepearls but this magazine also has a section on Finance! This time the post with the back link directly to www.interflora.com.au /christmas-hampers with the anchor text “gift baskets” was written by a Johanna Brewster. There is only a thumbnail of here but surprise surprise the domain ownership is hidden via a proxy. The article www.lsedz.com christmas-hampers-gift-baskets is equally as bad and probably written by one of Ahmed’s colleagues.
Then we have kowabanga.com same anchor text, same link destination as all of the above. This magazine also covers business though! The article on kowabanga was written by “Eric” . The list of these domains goes on and on. According to majesticseo they were only found in the last couple of months though. All of the sites mentioned here have heaps of anchor text rich backlinks to all sorts of businesses all over the world. It seems to be working for Interflora now but I wonder for how long?
Report them?
Why? It would take weeks to fill out the google forms for all of these and then months for Google to do anything.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
