

The War Over ‘Mother’s Day Flowers’ - ssclafani
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/07/business/07flowers.htm

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byrneseyeview
If any HNers have questions about the research, I'm happy to answer them. (I'm
the "Byrne" cited in the article.)

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Hipchan
I honestly don't get what Google is supposed to do in situations like this.
Google's algos are supposedly measuring for 'relevance'. But when it's not
documents you're talking about but companies offering probably identical
flowers for probably similar prices it's hard the make the argument that one
is more 'relevant' than another.

I honestly think Google should start a different 'business' section of the
search engine that plays by different rules. That is ranked by custom
satisfaction or price or something.

Otherwise the only ones who win are the SEO companies.

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jrockway
_I honestly think Google should start a different 'business' section of the
search engine that plays by different rules. That is ranked by custom
satisfaction or price or something._

It's called "Google Shopping". The problem is, nobody uses it, so optimizing
your business for it probably isn't going to be profitable. Because people
search for products in the "normal" Google search, that's where the incentives
to do SEO come from.

Personally, if I wanted to buy flowers, I would google for flowers and then
search for each company that turns up to find reviews. If you really want to
screw people like me over, you need shill reviews, not the #1 Google spot.

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mynameishere
I can't believe the nytimes gave one of those companies (1800flowers) an
extremely valuable anchor in such an article.

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tbgvi
They mentioned it as 1800Flowers.com, so their CMS probably turns anything
with '.com' into a link. I'm sure their SEOs high-five'd when they noticed
that :)

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transburgh
Is the NYT the new paid search police? I love that someone is targeting these
black hat tactics but it is interesting that the NYT keeps publishing articles
with sites and sending findings to google. I guess if it keeps putting google
and the buyers in the media it will help with the ultimate goal.

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pitdesi
Is there a good way that us white-hat folks can report our black-hat
competitors? Almost all of the sites ranking higher than us for key terms use
obvious black-hat techniques... backlinks from strange sites. I'm recording
them all in a spreadsheet and have reported them
[https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en&...](https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en&pli=1)
here but I don't think it does anything... thoughts?

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sliverstorm
Only solutions I'm aware of at this point is to A) Inform Google or B) Beat
them at their own game

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mattmanser
They are mutually exclusive you can't beat a black hat at their own game
without becoming one yourself.

I'm so torn about this ongoing debate, on the one hand I understand Google's
need to stop this kind of stuff, but on the other google game their own
rankings with extremely poorly marked adverts (very, very light yellow barely
distinguishable from the white of the search with an absurdly small 'Ads' in
the top right corner).

No newspaper could get away with that and yet people scream about newspapers
using outmoded models. The truth is that it's a lot more complicated, there's
a lot of laws governing newspaper behaviours while Google can get away with
murder. Google have recently done a lot of very, very underhanded and nasty
advertising in recent years in my opinion.

Their monopoly really stick in my craw. It's like having only one high street
in the entire world ruled by the Americans. Given the ever more extreme
stances american political parties are taking, it's not going to be a good
high street we're forced down for very long.

My only consolation it that at least they started from a fairly moral position
so their gradual corruption is one from a good position. At least they're not
Zynga.

