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Come dine with Fleur While most florists were prepping for the final run of Mother’s Day sales, Fleur Van Heijningen was making her debut appearance on Channel 4’s extremely popular Come Dine with Me which aired on Friday 8th March. A hit with viewers due mainly to


the hilariously sarcastic narrator Dave Lamb, we spoke to the brave but lovely Fleur of Theodora’s Florist near Chippenham to find out why she was willing to be on the receiving end of his torment! “A friend convinced me to apply


but I never really thought it would happen; a feeling that didn’t really change until the day itself. It was a pretty stressful experience and I was worried what the public would think of me considering the narrator’s cheeky way with words but I think people will always take


everything he says with a pinch of salt when watching as he clearly often exaggerates purely for entertainment!” It also made a nice little boost


for Fleur’s shop as some filming took place in Theodora’s. Trickier than you may imagine due to all the strict broadcasting rules, so no product placement or shop names were allowed but the shop still filled up with lots of locals stopping by to check out what was going on! But if you tune in and find Fleur


is portrayed as somewhat of a desperado girl on the hunt – the pre-launch blurb said: ‘single- and-ready-to-mingle florist Fleur Van Heijningen is on the prowl for a man’ – fear not. Because, the day after filming ended, Fleur went to the reception of one of her brides. So tired from the


Interflora penalised by Google


Just after Valentine’s Day, Interflora was wiped off the face of the internet in terms of search marketing terms. First reported on February 20th it became clear to hundreds of web experts that Google had applied the heaviest penalty on the company by removing its name from the search engine other than the paid for adverts. As a result for a period of time


the valuable page one was left wide open for other players like Waitrose, Serenata, Arena et al to take their place. According to the various websites following the story, it was described as a catastrophic penalty that apparently has only happened to similarly high profile players a couple of times in the last two years, notably BMW and JC Penney. The official reason for what


was described as a ‘shock and awe’ action by Google has not been confirmed and both Google and Interflora have declined to comment since the news broke. However, many online marketing


66 F&wb Spring 2013


sites would seem to believe the reason was due to Interflora buying a large number of ‘advertorials’ where they paid newspapers to publish copy that was written with the express intention of leading traffic to their site. Whilst advertorial is an


accepted route to market, Google rules expressively forbid their use unless the links contained in it are marked as ‘no follows’ which means they should not be considered by the search engines in their ranking algorithms. The rational we assume being that if Google didn’t do this it would give big players an unfair advantage by being able to ‘buy’ better rankings by unduly influencing the ranking calculations. However the belief is that


these backlinks were not marked properly and therefore broke the Google rules. According to some of our overseas contacts, and verified on the various blogs, it would appear that Interflora had been warned some time ago


as activity, started last summer, suggests that they were trying to get these backlinks removed. However the speculation is that they either didn’t move quickly enough or had carried on doing it and Google decided to act. Fortunately for Interflora - and


the many florists who rely on them for orders - Google allowed Interflora back just 11 days later and in time for the all-important Mother’s Day business. Totally unexpected, and at odds with the usual and predicted long term ban, whilst the rankings were not as high as they had been and there is still speculation that Google is monitoring Interflora very closely, the timing was kind to say the least.


escapades of the week she nearly didn’t go but ended up thankful because that was where she met the man of her dreams! Did she win the competition as well…? You’ll have to visit theflorist.co.uk as we were sworn to secrecy!


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