

Many Restaurants see their Google Places Profile Hijacked - papaver
http://www.reservationgenie.com/blog/17-many-restaurants-see-their-google-places-profile-hijacked

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calbear81
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.

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ivan_collins
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.

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ummmmmmmmmm
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.

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

[http://www.azuca.net/azuca/](http://www.azuca.net/azuca/) and
[https://azucasaborlatino.com/](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.

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redmattred
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.

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

~~~
ivan_collins
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.

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10feet
I am a bit confused, since reservationgenie is not google, how are they fixing
these entries?

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ivan_collins
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/](https://www.google.com/business/placesforbusiness/)

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SouthATL
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.

~~~
papaver
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?

~~~
droithomme
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.

~~~
orf
Or someone who just reads rather than posts

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timothy0530
Seems like a modern version of seo rule bending.

