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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
whoops, I mean to post that comment to the papaver comment:/. Nice to spot this link building scheme in the background. This could aggregate some significant link weight over time if they have some more complex than Google normally catches and penalizes with reciprocal linking.
Comments
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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/
whoops, I mean to post that comment to the papaver comment:/. Nice to spot this link building scheme in the background. This could aggregate some significant link weight over time if they have some more complex than Google normally catches and penalizes with reciprocal linking.