Google recently penalised Interflora for their recent unethical back-linking campaign. The flower company sent a free bouquet of flowers to hundreds of bloggers in attempt to gain links back to their website.
Backlinks are an important aspect of search engine optimisation that can improve your rank within the search engines. If done correctly your backlink profile can really help boost your website’s visibility for keywords related to your business.
The flower delivery company knows that bloggers would happily write an article after receiving cheap online flowers, which is why they set out on this campaign.
Interflora know the importance of backlinks and how they can be used to improve your search engine rankings. Sadly this innovative marketing idea backfired and they didn’t get the results they were expecting.
Instead of getting a nice SEO boost for their company for the backlinks they found they were penalised heavily by Google for unethical link-building.
Interflora hit by Google Penguin Penalty
The Google Penguin algorithm looks at unnatural/poor quality links to a website. It focuses on link networks, paid links, blog networks and unnatural link patterns.
Interflora quickly received a lot of links from blog’s, which is why Google’s algorithm picked up on what they were doing and this is what led Google to penalise the website.
Link building on the Internet had been made harder by search engines to avoid spammy and poor quality websites from obtaining lots of links to their website to try and get to the top of the search results.
Interflora has been established for a number of years and organically they rank well for flower related searches so it seems odd that they would be wanting to potentially jeopardise their good ranking position with this targeted backlink campaign.
The problem was not that Interflora were providing bloggers with free gifts, the issue was that the links didn’t use the “nofollow” attribute in their link to Interflora. nofollow is an attribute that can be assigned to a hyperlink to tell search engines that the link should not influence the target websites ranking in the search engine’s.
A week later and it looks like Google is reducing Interflora’s penalty and letting them rank in the search results. This little stunt has certainly hindered Interflora’s search engine rankings and it wouldn’t surprise us if it takes them a few months to regain their previous ranking positions in the search results.
What are your thoughts on Interflora link building and Google smack down situation? Leave your thoughts in the comments section below.
We may link to products and online services provided by third-parties. Soe of the links that we post on our site are affiliate links, which means that we receive commission if you purchase the item. We will never recommend a product or service that we have not used ourselves. Our reviews will be honest and we will only recommend something if we have found it useful.
Disclaimer:Lacey Tech Solutions publish blog articles to help small businesses. We are not liable for any damages if you choose to follow the advice from our blog.
An Edu backlink is particularly useful for anybody that tries backlink campaigns. The objective ought to be to entice an Edu backlink from authoritative instructional sites. It is much better to stay clear of sites that have low web page rankings. Focus is put on an association along with reputable sites that carry out well in search results page.
Hello James
.edu links do have more weighting but its important to properly research and plan a backlinking campaign. I would strongly suggest against buying links from edu domains if you’re trying to improve your ranking in search engines by getting some .edu domains linking to your site.
The most important thing to remember is keep your backlinking natural and make sure you website content is focused on the needs of your users and not the needs of the search engines.