Many Restaurants see their Google Places Profile Hijacked

http://www.reservationgenie.com/blog/17-many-restaurants-see-their-google-places-profile-hijacked

by papaver • 13 years ago

45 22 13 years ago

I can't speak to the others, but I've worked with EatStreet before, and I know all the restaurants have signed contracts with them and EatStreet manages their websites.

potatolicious• 13 years ago

This seems suspect. Taking the first example from the post:

http://www.azuca.net/azuca/ and https://azucasaborlatino.com/

These two websites do not point to each other at any point. The domain for the first website appears registered by the restaurant themselves, pointing to nameservers belonging to Dine Online - which looks like a marketing/web dev firm.

The second domain is registered by EatStreet.

Now, it seems likely to me that Azuca and EatStreet have some working relationship, most probably the same sort of relationship restaurants have with GrubHub or Seamless.

The problem here is language. EatStreet's page does not make it clear at all that this is a third party, and in fact seems to go out of its way to insinuate that this is in fact the official website for the restaurant. This seems like trademark infringement to me, but IANAL.

Sketchy, to say the least.

timothy05302• 13 years ago

That's a good point. The additional information is helpful. I wouldn't be very pleased if I was a restaurant owner. Makes me suspension of the website since it's not clear it's not the restaurant's actual website.

redmattred• 13 years ago

Jobs2Web (SEO for career sites) used to do this with their clients both to rank higher on specific search terms (keyword stuffing in domain names is a thing) and to lock the customer in.

papaver2• 13 years ago

maybe not eat street but what about order ahead? found 3 in 10 minutes with a seperate .net domain, 2 ranked #1 over the resturants .com domain with google places pointing to it. poor form order ahead. do the restaurants know your 'takeout' site ranks ahead of them on google and the google places points to your site? is this something they agreed to?

Tarascos Mexican Restaurant

Lemon Poppy Kitchen

La Luna Negra

rahimnathwani• 13 years ago

The .net site even includes a helpful hint to 'Additional Restaurants'. How generous of La Luna Negra to advertise their competitors! /s

http://lalunanegra.net/additional-restaurants/

ivan_collins6• 13 years ago

I'm the author of this blog post and just want to comment that it's very hard to rank a fresh site ahead of the restaurant's true website. The inbound links from Yelp, Trip Advisor, Urban Spoon, and Open Table give carry a lot of page rank and it's likely got more history behind it too. Although I bet Order Aheads App could be doing some cross linking schemes in the background to elevate their sites. But it's only by claiming their Google Places profile that they get to intercept the primary traffic. Look at what happened to Order Ahead site for Bar Pintxo after updating Google Places...it fell to 4th in the SERPs.

droithomme3• 13 years ago

Welcome to Hacker News, ummmmmmmmmm. Congratulations on making your first post ever after 228 days in stealth mode.

timothy05302• 13 years ago

Seems like a modern version of seo rule bending.

SouthATL• 13 years ago

With a little bit of investigation, you can see this headline is alarmist. These aren't hijackings, they are just restaurants who are authorizing other companies to manage their online presence.

ivan_collins6• 13 years ago

I don't doubt that these restaurants might have authorized these companies to do this by signing a contract that they didn't read fully or understand. It may have been completely legal, but it's still taking advantage of these restaurants' lack of internet savvy and awareness. I spoke to them and 4 out of 4 were not aware they had authorized anything and asked me to fix it immediately. Each case varies in severity, but all the motives behind each of these cases could have been done strategically and in a way that did not compromise the restaurant's website traffic. They could add online ordering to their website. Their profiles were hijacked for a side agenda of the company who made the site.

papaver2• 13 years ago

seems a little sketch to me to be creating external domains which would be competing with the main website. like having bar pintxo's menu on a .org with google places linked to it and being ranked #1 on google. i don't see many restaurant owners agreeing to that. its one thing to have the menu under a subdomain its quite another to be competing for the same traffic. seriously?

droithomme3• 13 years ago

Check out SouthATL's posting history, and that of his twin mmmmmmmmmm. These accounts were created nearly a year ago and sat without any activity whatsoever until just now. This matches the pattern of aged accounts owned by brokers that are available on major social networking accounts for sale to PR reps who need to post from an account that appears to be other than a brand new one.

These posters will not be able to validate their identity.

This is as standard and common pattern these days which is identified fairly easily.

droithomme3• 13 years ago

Welcome to Hacker News, SouthATL. Congratulations on making your first post ever after 311 days in stealth mode.

10feet• 13 years ago

I am a bit confused, since reservationgenie is not google, how are they fixing these entries?

ivan_collins6• 13 years ago

I wrote this post. We claim their Google Places profiles in the same way the hijackers did and then submit a request to Google to update the URL back to their original URL. Here's a link: https://www.google.com/business/placesforbusiness/

calbear81• 13 years ago

I can understand that the Google Places URL link pointing to the non-official site being a problem but I have no issue with a 3rd party site who built a better ranking page for a restaurant. Many restaurants still have flash-intros, PDF menus and other annoyances that make those sites far less useful than a 3rd party site that has translated all that data into something that works consistently on my phone.

The other point I would point out is that ordering online does not require working with a restaurant. Many of these delivery services are "hacking" delivery by becoming the delivery provider. They just order on your behalf, pick up the food, and drive it to your home regardless of whether the restaurant offers that option or not.

ivan_collins6• 13 years ago

I wrote this post originally and totally agree about the Flash sites and PDF menus being debatable for those types of websites. But these restaurants have good websites and these hijacker sites aren't more useful. The Eat Street sites have a map, order online button, and a menu...and it's not sexy. The Order Ahead App is pretty solid. But it was promoting downloading an app to order food at Bar Pintxo. But Bar Pinxto wasn't even an "available option" to order. It's driving traffic to download their app and not a bit of value to the restaurant. It's OK to build a website to promote your online ordering. It's hijacking the Google Places profile that is sketchy. These restaurants are upset when I explain what happened.

MichaelGG• 13 years ago

Seems like these restaurants would win those other domains under straightforward trademark disputes, right?

ivan_collins6• 13 years ago

I'm sure they could get their domains back through court. But just updating their Google Places Profile is a lot easier. Most are just clueless.

Many Restaurants see their Google Places Profile Hijacked

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