Many Restaurants see their Google Places Profile Hijacked (opens in new tab)

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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/