Happy Mother's Day to Moms everywhere! Just as Google has done for the past 10 years, a Google Doodle has been posted in numerous countries today around the world that are celebrating mothers, including the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, and India.
Happy Mother’s Day to Moms everywhere! Just as Google has done for the past 10 years, a Google Doodle has been posted in numerous countries today around the world that are celebrating mothers, including the United States, Australia, New Zealand, India, and many more.
This isn’t the first time the purple logo with the flower replacing the “l” has appeared on Google. The Doodle previously appeared in countries including Spain and Portugal, which celebrated Mother’s Day on the first Sunday in May — the same day Google’s World Fair logo appeared for the majority of the world.
Hopefully the people Googling to find out the date of Mother’s Day found their answer in time.
Not surprisingly, people have been busy searching for gifts. Searches for Mother’s Day gifts worldwide have steadily risen in the past 30 days — up 150 percent. In the U.S. alone, gift searches on Google are up 350 percent.
Will you be taking your mother to brunch? With a 650 percent increase in searches for Mother’s Day brunch worldwide, it seems that people are trying to find the best restaurants to take mom.
The National Restaurant Association estimates that 75 million Americans will eat at a restaurant today, so hopefully you made your reservations early. That survey also notes that 58 percent of mothers will go out for dinner; 32 percent for lunch; 24 percent for brunch; and 10 percent for breakfast.
Poems are another hot search on Google, up 400 percent in the past month as people look to “borrow” an existing poem or perhaps find some ideas or inspiration to write their own.
Many people are also searching for Mother’s Day crafts (up 180 percent worldwide and up 250 percent in the U.S.) and crafts for kids (up 200 percent worldwide), as parents look to the web for instructions on helping their children turn household items into a special handmade gift.
Australia led the world in search volume for Mother’s Day, followed by the U.S., New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, Philippines, Singapore, India, the UK, and Germany. England’s Mothering Sunday was April 3, but was denied a Google Doodle this year, as Google opted rather to celebrate the 119th anniversary of the first documented ice cream sundae.
In the U.S., flowers are the hot item this year. Google searches for Mother’s Day flowers are up 450 percent.
With $1.9 billion in flower sales expected for Mother’s Day, it has brought out fresh link buying complaints this weekend in The New York Times (the newspaper that outed JCPenney earlier this year). Flower retailers Proflowers, 1800Flowers.com, Teleflora and FTD attempted (and failed) to game Google for higher rankings for searches including “mothers day flowers,” “mothers day arrangements” and “cheap mothers day flowers.”
Google’s response to the Times: “None of the links shared by The New York Times had a significant impact on our rankings, due to automated systems we have in place to assess the relevance of links. As always, we investigate spam reports and take corrective action where appropriate.”
So, of course, the Times ran the story anyway, which prominently featured Digital Due Diligence as some sort of expert altruistic organization. SEO Book.com’s Aaron Wall has a good post on why this practice of outing competitors is horrible for the SEO industry and why “these sort of folks who throw the whole of the SEO industry under a bus for self-promotion should be shunned by the industry.”