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I think that this practice of Yelp is pretty malicious. I did have a shower thought the other day, though: Individual restaurants often run their own websites.

I think that this practice of Yelp is pretty malicious. I did have a shower thought the other day, though: Individual restaurants often run their own websites. Plenty of those offer a phone number for you to call them through, and they frequently encourage you to do so because it saves them on order fees typically accrued by Yelp, GrubHub, Seamless, or any other order system. In order for that site to show up first in a Google search, they need to be better at SEO than, say, Seamless. This might not be a super hard problem in general, but if you're running your own restaurant, the cost of building and maintaining a website with good SEO can be relatively high. Seamless, on the other hand, does nothing but focus on problem areas like building SEO-optimal landing pages for restaurants. Plus, they just have to figure out a good SEO strategy once in order to be able to apply it broadly (and they aren't themselves busy cooking food, prepping orders, and waiting tables). In general, restaurant websites appear higher than their online ordered alternatives, but what's to stop Seamless (for example) from winning the SEO race against a non-trivial chunk of small restaurant websites? This would mean that there are plenty of cases in which you search for a restaurant and end up on Seamless, even though that's not the "right" search result. I don't really have any answers here, but I'd love to know if there's anything in place to prevent situations like this, or if I'm ignorant about how SEO works.

gerbal 6y ago
> Yelp, GrubHub, Seamless Interesting choice of examples! Grubhub owns Seamless and bought Yelp's delivery service (formerly Eat24). Grubhub also owns AllMenus and MenuPages. So an individual restaurant has to compete with 5 different sophisticated offerings from one company for SEO position.
Kalium 6y ago
> In general, restaurant websites appear higher than their online ordered alternatives They do, in the case where people are looking for a specific restaurant. What about the now-increasingly-common case where people are looking to see what's open and doing delivery nearby? Looking through a dozen restaurant's websites to hunt down all that info (and hoping it's current) is a pretty miserable experience. Yelp makes it trivial to filter on a map. Restaurants have two SEO problems: their particular restaurant and the generically hungry searcher. Yelp and co only have the latter. They are, as you say, outclassed.
- cgriswald 6y ago
  > Looking through a dozen restaurant's websites to hunt down all that info (and hoping it's current) is a pretty miserable experience. Yelp makes it trivial to filter on a map. On desktop, maybe. Here's my experience trying this out on mobile (safari/iOS) just now: I searched for "Pizza" with "San Francisco, CA" pre-filled. I am presented with a screen that ostensibly gives me a choice between "Open in the Yelp App" and "Continue to mobile site." I say ostensibly, because I don't get the chance to choose before a second tab opens up with a strange URL that causes iOS to open up the app store to their app. I close the app store and go back to Safari and click "continue to mobile site". There are some results listed. I click "map". Yelp asks me for my location. I allow it. It shows me results for San Francisco. I'm about 30 miles away on the peninsula. Now, I know I searched for San Francisco, and maybe that's what I want. But then what is Yelp even doing with my location? At the bottom is an add for their iOS App. I click "x" to close it. Nothing happens. After four clicks, it finally leaves. I click "Filters", select "Open Now" and submit. Yelp asks for my location again. I allow it. It now shows me the results that are open, still ranging from SF to Colma. (So again, I have no idea what they're doing with my location.) I click on a result. In this case, Golden Boy Pizza. I click on a photo. I scroll a few photos. On the sixth photo, I am presented the option of viewing all 3427 photos ...in the app. I scroll down to look at reviews. Oh, those stars aren't reviews for this restaurant. They're sponsored suggestions. I scroll down further. I click a review that looks interesting because I want to read the whole thing. ...it takes me back to the app store without even a prompt. --- So, yeah, it's technically 'trivial' in the sense that you can get a list. But to actually use that list, you have to worry if any random click is going to take you away from the website. Some of the information you want is completely inaccessible without installing their software. (And even if you go through it all, there's no guarantee Yelp's information is current either.) Even if I trusted Yelp, I'd rather use any other method to find a pizza place.
  - Can_Not 6y ago
    Great summary of how shitty the experience is of browsing literally any website that has a mobile app or unecessary login.
  - 6y ago
heavyset_go 6y ago
> In general, restaurant websites appear higher than their online ordered alternatives, but what's to stop Seamless (for example) from winning the SEO race against a non-trivial chunk of small restaurant websites? This would mean that there are plenty of cases in which you search for a restaurant and end up on Seamless, even though that's not the "right" search result. This already happens. These platforms go as far as posing as the businesses themselves, using the businesses' names and sometimes even stealing assets from the restaurants' real sites, like the logos or location pictures. Slice did this to a local pizzeria that opened right before the pandemic hit and has been struggling. It's just so scummy, but the platforms are betting that small businesses don't have the resources to fight them, and they're right. If I posed as say, Best Buy or Domino's, and created fake websites using their assets, not only would I be dragged into court on civil suits, but I'd be raided by the FBI for trademark and copyright infringement.
- FireBeyond 6y ago
  Look (listen?) for the cagey answers: "Is this Restaurant X?" "I can help you place an order!" "But is this Restaurant X?" "I can take your X order when ready!"
  - Can_Not 6y ago
    Hypothetically, what happens when the answerer wrongly replies "Yes"? The yes would indicate "yes, that is the restaurant your order will goto" but what's next?
    - FireBeyond 6y ago
      I suppose, _hypothetically_, if you were a restaurant owner and didn't violate audio recording laws, and you got this, you'd have a good case against Yelp for fraud or dishonestly obtaining financial advantage by deception.
addicted 6y ago
Yelp is winning the SEO race. When searching for restaurants that I know of, I find the Grubhub/Yelp websites appear well before the actual restaurant's website. I dont know if Yelp does this, but Grubhub has the insidious practice of creating fake websites for restaurants without ever requesting permission to do so.
- rchaud 6y ago
  It's actually Google and Bing that are winning. Everyone else is losing to various degrees. "SEO" depends on a wide array of factors, such as mobile-friendliness and a semantic link structure. But what ultimately ends up winning are established domains with tons of indexable pages. Backlinks matter, but the difference is negligible for sites that operate on the scale of Yelp. If an aggregator's page appears before yours on the organic search results, your only choice is to pay Google or Bing to put your listing at the top. If you are a random restaurant, your 3-page website is never going to beat Yelp.
BlueTemplar 6y ago
Literally, in TFA : > In June, H. Claire Brown at The New Food Economy reported that the food delivery platform Grubhub has been creating thousands of websites in restaurants’ names, sometimes surpassing the restaurant’s own website in search engine visibility, in order to drive more online orders and commissions for Grubhub. The piece sparked a backlash from conscientious customers pledging to order directly in the future in order to protect their favorite restaurants’ profits. Natt Garun, a Verge writer whose parents own a restaurant, wrote a guide to finding a restaurant’s real contact information and avoid Grubhub’s fees to businesses. This involves dodging Grubhub-owned properties (Seamless, AllMenus, LevelUp, Tapingo, MenuPages, and Eat24) as well as the Grubhub-created websites and the Yelp app. https://newfoodeconomy.org/grubhub-domain-purchases-thousands-shadow-sites/ https://newfoodeconomy.org/grubhub-domain-purchases-thousand...
- yaur 6y ago
  Isn't this the exact thing that trademarks were invented to prevent? I don't really get how they are getting away with this.
  - dayjobpork 6y ago
    Lawyers are expensive.
  - pavon 6y ago
    Suppose I pay a marketing firm money to run an advertising campaign to promote my business. They wouldn't be violating any laws by using my trademarks as part of doing this job, according to the contract we signed. That is what Grubhub claims they are doing. They aren't doing this to random third-parties - just restaurants that signed up with Grubhub's marketing service and agreed to allow them to do these things in their terms of service. Unfortunately, in this world of EULAs that are far too numerous to ever read and understand, most of the restaurants didn't realize what they were signing up for. This behavior absolutely scummy, but the question of whether it is legal is more of a contract issue than a trademark one.
    - 6y ago
underwater 6y ago
Google is fundmentally broken, and has fundamentally broken the web. SEO means that people are effectively buying the top Google spots, and niche, non commercial, and smaller sites consistently lose out. For example an SaaS company might have 50 employees, with 10 people dedicated to SEO, generating backlinks (i.e. spamming other companies asking for reciprocated links) and writing landing pages and blog posts to target specific keywords. The fact that this works means that only well funded companies can succeed by bleeding money at the alter of page rank. In the old days we had paid search engines. Google promised to replace that by surfacing what you really want. But now we have a search engine that ranks results based on how much money you can spend on silly SEO rituals. Is that really any better?
- donmcronald 6y ago
  People always adapt to work the system. It's "juking the stats" and IMO the thing that makes it so easy is that computers are great at correlation, but worthless when it comes to cause and effect. Blog posts tended to be a good source of info, so now everything is a blog post because all Google sees is blog post = good. Without a certain amount of human intervention and moderation, the computers are extraordinarily stupid. I think the system that eventually topples Google will be something that's built with an expectation of having a certain level of human interaction. If I had to make a try at it right now I'd focus on local search; restaurants, events, groups, classifieds, etc. and build something that's sustainable via franchises. That way the human component would always be someone local to a community, they could take some of the profit, and they'd act as moderators / advisors for their community. TLDR; You need more people involved.
  - dmart 6y ago
    > Blog posts tended to be a good source of info, so now everything is a blog post because all Google sees is blog post = good. Ah, this explains why looking for reviews or comparisons for any type of product returns page after page of fake, single-purpose blogs now. You'd think Google would have wised up to this obvious, annoying SEO strategy by now.
briandear 6y ago
Maybe Google should fix that. If you Google a restaurant, your intent is to visit that restaurant website. If you add “reviews” after the query, then the intent is to read reviews about that restaurant. It’s trivial for Google to prioritize the actual website over agreegators. Most restaurants already have the ability to set up and “claim” their business on Google. Why not simply surface the “claimed” result first. A better experience for everyone.
- dmoy 6y ago
  The restaurants we typically order from (all 3-5 of them), the first hit on google is an organic search result for that restaurant. No ads even. In some cases, it's the first two organic results (a main website, and then a direct link to their menu on that same website, which for some reason shows up as two different organic search results - I don't even mean sitelinks or the new indented stuff, I mean full on bona fide second organic search result for the same domain). The only one that I usually order from for which this isn't the case doesn't actually have their own website. So in some cases this is working. What doesn't work for me is searching for the type of food - that's all aggregator sites.
covercash 6y ago
> what's to stop Seamless (for example) from winning the SEO race against a non-trivial chunk of small restaurant websites? This would mean that there are plenty of cases in which you search for a restaurant and end up on Seamless, even though that's not the "right" search result. This is exactly what Slice does. They create a plausible sounding url and outrank small pizza shops. They also replace the phone number so orders get routed through their call center. They end up charging more for both phone and online orders through their site. They also encourage users to install the Slice app. Before I realized what was happening, I ordered through Slice twice (one online and one phone order) and both times they sent my order to a completely wrong address 15 minutes away from me. That’s what made me dig a little bit and discover their shady practices.
jimmaswell 6y ago
In my experience a restaurant's real website is always in the top results on google and almost always the one linked from google maps.
ip26 6y ago
It just hit me- this rings of an "SEO racket"! perpetrators fraudulently offer [...] a service that solves a problem that would not exist without the racket. Particularly, the potential problem may be caused by the same party that offers to solve it The "problem" is that you aren't the top search result- because they are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_racket https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_racket https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeering
onion2k 6y ago
You're assuming that Google's algorithm treats a small restaurant website and a site like Seamless equally based on the same SEO ranking factors. That assumption ignores some important factors; - Seamless have enough capital to buy the ad space at the top of every restaurant search. They'll always be at the top. - Google weights things like inbound links highly. A massive site like Seamless will always win on those factors. - Google allegedly considers domain and website age as important in pagerank. Seamless has an advantage over new restaurants there. - Most importantly though, for all we know Google's algorithm could simply be biased in favor of Seamless. It's a black box. There could be a rule that just says "if (seamless.com) rank += 10000". If Google users prefer SERPs where that gets applied then it'll be there. There's no reason to believe pagerank is fair.
franga2000 6y ago
I've seen something like this play out twice already. The first round was quite some years back with Facebook pages beating the restaurants' own websites. Facebook's SEO was so much better than the average website that many businesses, including restaurants, eventually gave up and just put everything on Facebook. The second round is just starting to happen where I live with a local food delivery startup beginning to beat even the aforementioned FB pages and the official website often being the 3rd or lower link. In terms of what there is to prevent this: Google has a feature where "business owners" can enter an official URL and that gets a pretty nice boost, but that's just giving more power to Google, who is already successfully competing with all of the aforementioned parties. Other search engines either don't have this feature or do but nobody uses it. Other than that, the only way to combat this is to only ever link to your official site, make it as accessible as possible and try to avoid doing business with a company who is willing to screw you over like that (of course easier said than done).

gerbal 6y ago

> Yelp, GrubHub, Seamless Interesting choice of examples! Grubhub owns Seamless and bought Yelp's delivery service (formerly Eat24). Grubhub also owns AllMenus and MenuPages. So an individual restaurant has to compete with 5 different sophisticated offerings from one company for SEO position.

Kalium 6y ago

> In general, restaurant websites appear higher than their online ordered alternatives They do, in the case where people are looking for a specific restaurant. What about the now-increasingly-common case where people are looking to see what's open and doing delivery nearby? Looking through a dozen restaurant's websites to hunt down all that info (and hoping it's current) is a pretty miserable experience. Yelp makes it trivial to filter on a map. Restaurants have two SEO problems: their particular restaurant and the generically hungry searcher. Yelp and co only have the latter. They are, as you say, outclassed.

cgriswald 6y ago
> Looking through a dozen restaurant's websites to hunt down all that info (and hoping it's current) is a pretty miserable experience. Yelp makes it trivial to filter on a map. On desktop, maybe. Here's my experience trying this out on mobile (safari/iOS) just now: I searched for "Pizza" with "San Francisco, CA" pre-filled. I am presented with a screen that ostensibly gives me a choice between "Open in the Yelp App" and "Continue to mobile site." I say ostensibly, because I don't get the chance to choose before a second tab opens up with a strange URL that causes iOS to open up the app store to their app. I close the app store and go back to Safari and click "continue to mobile site". There are some results listed. I click "map". Yelp asks me for my location. I allow it. It shows me results for San Francisco. I'm about 30 miles away on the peninsula. Now, I know I searched for San Francisco, and maybe that's what I want. But then what is Yelp even doing with my location? At the bottom is an add for their iOS App. I click "x" to close it. Nothing happens. After four clicks, it finally leaves. I click "Filters", select "Open Now" and submit. Yelp asks for my location again. I allow it. It now shows me the results that are open, still ranging from SF to Colma. (So again, I have no idea what they're doing with my location.) I click on a result. In this case, Golden Boy Pizza. I click on a photo. I scroll a few photos. On the sixth photo, I am presented the option of viewing all 3427 photos ...in the app. I scroll down to look at reviews. Oh, those stars aren't reviews for this restaurant. They're sponsored suggestions. I scroll down further. I click a review that looks interesting because I want to read the whole thing. ...it takes me back to the app store without even a prompt. --- So, yeah, it's technically 'trivial' in the sense that you can get a list. But to actually use that list, you have to worry if any random click is going to take you away from the website. Some of the information you want is completely inaccessible without installing their software. (And even if you go through it all, there's no guarantee Yelp's information is current either.) Even if I trusted Yelp, I'd rather use any other method to find a pizza place.
- Can_Not 6y ago
  Great summary of how shitty the experience is of browsing literally any website that has a mobile app or unecessary login.
- 6y ago

heavyset_go 6y ago

> In general, restaurant websites appear higher than their online ordered alternatives, but what's to stop Seamless (for example) from winning the SEO race against a non-trivial chunk of small restaurant websites? This would mean that there are plenty of cases in which you search for a restaurant and end up on Seamless, even though that's not the "right" search result. This already happens. These platforms go as far as posing as the businesses themselves, using the businesses' names and sometimes even stealing assets from the restaurants' real sites, like the logos or location pictures. Slice did this to a local pizzeria that opened right before the pandemic hit and has been struggling. It's just so scummy, but the platforms are betting that small businesses don't have the resources to fight them, and they're right. If I posed as say, Best Buy or Domino's, and created fake websites using their assets, not only would I be dragged into court on civil suits, but I'd be raided by the FBI for trademark and copyright infringement.

FireBeyond 6y ago
Look (listen?) for the cagey answers: "Is this Restaurant X?" "I can help you place an order!" "But is this Restaurant X?" "I can take your X order when ready!"
- Can_Not 6y ago
  Hypothetically, what happens when the answerer wrongly replies "Yes"? The yes would indicate "yes, that is the restaurant your order will goto" but what's next?
  - FireBeyond 6y ago
    I suppose, _hypothetically_, if you were a restaurant owner and didn't violate audio recording laws, and you got this, you'd have a good case against Yelp for fraud or dishonestly obtaining financial advantage by deception.

addicted 6y ago

Yelp is winning the SEO race. When searching for restaurants that I know of, I find the Grubhub/Yelp websites appear well before the actual restaurant's website. I dont know if Yelp does this, but Grubhub has the insidious practice of creating fake websites for restaurants without ever requesting permission to do so.

rchaud 6y ago
It's actually Google and Bing that are winning. Everyone else is losing to various degrees. "SEO" depends on a wide array of factors, such as mobile-friendliness and a semantic link structure. But what ultimately ends up winning are established domains with tons of indexable pages. Backlinks matter, but the difference is negligible for sites that operate on the scale of Yelp. If an aggregator's page appears before yours on the organic search results, your only choice is to pay Google or Bing to put your listing at the top. If you are a random restaurant, your 3-page website is never going to beat Yelp.

BlueTemplar 6y ago

Literally, in TFA : > In June, H. Claire Brown at The New Food Economy reported that the food delivery platform Grubhub has been creating thousands of websites in restaurants’ names, sometimes surpassing the restaurant’s own website in search engine visibility, in order to drive more online orders and commissions for Grubhub. The piece sparked a backlash from conscientious customers pledging to order directly in the future in order to protect their favorite restaurants’ profits. Natt Garun, a Verge writer whose parents own a restaurant, wrote a guide to finding a restaurant’s real contact information and avoid Grubhub’s fees to businesses. This involves dodging Grubhub-owned properties (Seamless, AllMenus, LevelUp, Tapingo, MenuPages, and Eat24) as well as the Grubhub-created websites and the Yelp app. https://newfoodeconomy.org/grubhub-domain-purchases-thousands-shadow-sites/ https://newfoodeconomy.org/grubhub-domain-purchases-thousand...

yaur 6y ago
Isn't this the exact thing that trademarks were invented to prevent? I don't really get how they are getting away with this.
- dayjobpork 6y ago
  Lawyers are expensive.
- pavon 6y ago
  Suppose I pay a marketing firm money to run an advertising campaign to promote my business. They wouldn't be violating any laws by using my trademarks as part of doing this job, according to the contract we signed. That is what Grubhub claims they are doing. They aren't doing this to random third-parties - just restaurants that signed up with Grubhub's marketing service and agreed to allow them to do these things in their terms of service. Unfortunately, in this world of EULAs that are far too numerous to ever read and understand, most of the restaurants didn't realize what they were signing up for. This behavior absolutely scummy, but the question of whether it is legal is more of a contract issue than a trademark one.
  - 6y ago

underwater 6y ago

Google is fundmentally broken, and has fundamentally broken the web. SEO means that people are effectively buying the top Google spots, and niche, non commercial, and smaller sites consistently lose out. For example an SaaS company might have 50 employees, with 10 people dedicated to SEO, generating backlinks (i.e. spamming other companies asking for reciprocated links) and writing landing pages and blog posts to target specific keywords. The fact that this works means that only well funded companies can succeed by bleeding money at the alter of page rank. In the old days we had paid search engines. Google promised to replace that by surfacing what you really want. But now we have a search engine that ranks results based on how much money you can spend on silly SEO rituals. Is that really any better?

donmcronald 6y ago
People always adapt to work the system. It's "juking the stats" and IMO the thing that makes it so easy is that computers are great at correlation, but worthless when it comes to cause and effect. Blog posts tended to be a good source of info, so now everything is a blog post because all Google sees is blog post = good. Without a certain amount of human intervention and moderation, the computers are extraordinarily stupid. I think the system that eventually topples Google will be something that's built with an expectation of having a certain level of human interaction. If I had to make a try at it right now I'd focus on local search; restaurants, events, groups, classifieds, etc. and build something that's sustainable via franchises. That way the human component would always be someone local to a community, they could take some of the profit, and they'd act as moderators / advisors for their community. TLDR; You need more people involved.
- dmart 6y ago
  > Blog posts tended to be a good source of info, so now everything is a blog post because all Google sees is blog post = good. Ah, this explains why looking for reviews or comparisons for any type of product returns page after page of fake, single-purpose blogs now. You'd think Google would have wised up to this obvious, annoying SEO strategy by now.

briandear 6y ago

Maybe Google should fix that. If you Google a restaurant, your intent is to visit that restaurant website. If you add “reviews” after the query, then the intent is to read reviews about that restaurant. It’s trivial for Google to prioritize the actual website over agreegators. Most restaurants already have the ability to set up and “claim” their business on Google. Why not simply surface the “claimed” result first. A better experience for everyone.

dmoy 6y ago
The restaurants we typically order from (all 3-5 of them), the first hit on google is an organic search result for that restaurant. No ads even. In some cases, it's the first two organic results (a main website, and then a direct link to their menu on that same website, which for some reason shows up as two different organic search results - I don't even mean sitelinks or the new indented stuff, I mean full on bona fide second organic search result for the same domain). The only one that I usually order from for which this isn't the case doesn't actually have their own website. So in some cases this is working. What doesn't work for me is searching for the type of food - that's all aggregator sites.

covercash 6y ago

> what's to stop Seamless (for example) from winning the SEO race against a non-trivial chunk of small restaurant websites? This would mean that there are plenty of cases in which you search for a restaurant and end up on Seamless, even though that's not the "right" search result. This is exactly what Slice does. They create a plausible sounding url and outrank small pizza shops. They also replace the phone number so orders get routed through their call center. They end up charging more for both phone and online orders through their site. They also encourage users to install the Slice app. Before I realized what was happening, I ordered through Slice twice (one online and one phone order) and both times they sent my order to a completely wrong address 15 minutes away from me. That’s what made me dig a little bit and discover their shady practices.

jimmaswell 6y ago

In my experience a restaurant's real website is always in the top results on google and almost always the one linked from google maps.

ip26 6y ago

It just hit me- this rings of an "SEO racket"! perpetrators fraudulently offer [...] a service that solves a problem that would not exist without the racket. Particularly, the potential problem may be caused by the same party that offers to solve it The "problem" is that you aren't the top search result- because they are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_racket https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_racket https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeering

onion2k 6y ago

You're assuming that Google's algorithm treats a small restaurant website and a site like Seamless equally based on the same SEO ranking factors. That assumption ignores some important factors; - Seamless have enough capital to buy the ad space at the top of every restaurant search. They'll always be at the top. - Google weights things like inbound links highly. A massive site like Seamless will always win on those factors. - Google allegedly considers domain and website age as important in pagerank. Seamless has an advantage over new restaurants there. - Most importantly though, for all we know Google's algorithm could simply be biased in favor of Seamless. It's a black box. There could be a rule that just says "if (seamless.com) rank += 10000". If Google users prefer SERPs where that gets applied then it'll be there. There's no reason to believe pagerank is fair.

franga2000 6y ago

I've seen something like this play out twice already. The first round was quite some years back with Facebook pages beating the restaurants' own websites. Facebook's SEO was so much better than the average website that many businesses, including restaurants, eventually gave up and just put everything on Facebook. The second round is just starting to happen where I live with a local food delivery startup beginning to beat even the aforementioned FB pages and the official website often being the 3rd or lower link. In terms of what there is to prevent this: Google has a feature where "business owners" can enter an official URL and that gets a pretty nice boost, but that's just giving more power to Google, who is already successfully competing with all of the aforementioned parties. Other search engines either don't have this feature or do but nobody uses it. Other than that, the only way to combat this is to only ever link to your official site, make it as accessible as possible and try to avoid doing business with a company who is willing to screw you over like that (of course easier said than done).