How many flower-buying consumers haven’t heard of 1-800-Flowers or FTD? When they decide to purchase direct from a local florist and skip a middleman, it’s logical a shopper would head to a Local resource to help find a brick and mortar flower shop in the city where their gift is destined.
In our first article about Mapspam on Yahoo Local, we covered an out-of-market ‘order gatherer’ (an affiliate of a national wire service) creating local-sounding company names, using manufactured addresses, spamming user reviews and leaving black hat negative ratings on legitimate local florists.
One of the questions left unanswered was how that set of bogus listings made their way into Yahoo Local in the first place.
In investigating this next set of phony ‘local’ companies, there’s a strong correlation between the florist’s listings in Y Local and those shown in data provider/Y Local marketing partner YellowPages.com (owned by AT&T).
The florist, Exceptional Flowers and Gifts, 2800 N Federal Highway, Boca Raton, FL is and member of FTD. (FTD also hosts the florist’s website and keeps a percentage of each order destined back to the city where a shopper thought he/she was purchasing direct from in the first place.) Y Local users’ orders through Exceptional Flowers & Gifts numerous listings will be filtered through their Florida location, then passed though FTD and then relayed back to a real local florist in the community.
Exceptional Flowers & Gifts (EF&G) has acquired remote-call-forwarded local phone numbers in cities across the US, listed the locations of real B&M stores, and is now running what appears to be coordinated banner ad campaigns across Y Local and YellowPages.com. – using the same data and the same tracking code - yp5.
Here’s an example from Nashville, TN:
Yellowpages.com listing:
Yahoo Local Nashville banner ad:
Yahoo Local listing of ‘Nashville’ store:
By adding in a hefty dose of review spam, the team has managed to push some of the faux ‘natural listings’ higher in each city’s results.
Note that some of the reviews were originally written about different fake local listings but have been recycled, redirected and now appear under newer ‘local florist’ EF&G profiles. Did Y Local have a roll in redirecting the reviews? They sure help give the newer listings instant cred.
What’s to stop any and every other out-of-area flower seller from purchasing RCF and buying ads for the misleading listings? AT&T can sell the RCF, YP.com can sell the ads there and in Y Local, and then 10 of these in each city (plus one cooperative real local florist) could crowd out the other real local florists entirely.
(We note that in claiming physical addresses, companies can trigger requirements in many jurisdictions to hold applicable business licenses, register with the states’ tax boards, and collect & remit appropriate sales taxes.)
Local florists had hoped that sites like Yahoo Local would help cut through the affiliate marketing clutter of FTD, 1-800-Flowers and other ‘order gatherers’ and become reliable sources for consumers seeking to purchase direct from real brick and mortar flower shops. We believe their users expect that, too.
Instead, Y local is starting to look more like yellowpages.com, where real locals get buried deep beneath a layer of affiliate marketers ‘serving your city’.
Are local florists the only people who think florist wire services should stop members that use false addresses or who believe publishers shouldn’t monetize their sites if it means selling out their users?
Added: A big thanks to the Understanding Google Maps and Yahoo Local blog for covering Yahoo Local Mapspam and bringing the issue of phony local florist spam to light.
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