Eat.ch and Hundreds of Placeholder Sites? [en]

[fr] Le site eat.ch crée des centaines de "pseudo-sites" pour des restaurants listées dans leur index. Ces "sites" contiennent deux pages, une page d'accueil et une page avec l'adresse du resto, ainsi qu'un lien (sans "nofollow") vers eat.ch. Blackhat SEO ou bien juste pratique limite? D'après moi, on est quand même dans le linkspam, car en agissant ainsi eat.ch crée un nombre artificiel de liens entrants vers leur domaine principal. Ces pseudo-sites font aussi parfois même concurrence au "vrai site" du restaurant en question!

Has anybody noticed what eat.ch are doing? They’re creating hundreds of pretty-much-empty placeholder sites for restaurants in their listing (I’m assuming those businesses paid eat.ch to be listed).

Here’s one example: http://www.allegrotto-pizza.ch/. The site has two pages: the landing page and the address page. It seems to also allow online ordering and a link to the menu, but those links take you directly to the eat.ch directory.

ALLEGROTTO%20PIZZA-%20UND%20INDIAKURIER%20-%20Bederstrasse%20102,%208002,%20Z%C3%83%C2%BCrich%20-%20Restaurant

There are over 200 of these “sites”: http://www.bamboo-rorschach.ch/, http://foodpalace-kurier.ch/, http://www.multi-pizza-fahrwangen.ch/…

Why is this a problem?

First of all, some of these businesses have “real” sites, like my first example, Allegrotto Pizza (this is their “real” site). If eat.ch is charging them for a listing and creating a placeholder site without them realizing, that’s not very cool. If eat.ch is charging them for a website, then it’s not very cool either, as that “website” is little more than a placeholder page for a link to eat.ch. The “eat.ch placeholder site” ends up competing in search ranking with the restaurant’s legit site.

Then, I initially wondered if the whole purpose of these sites was to boost eat.ch’s PageRank. Incoming links from other domains count for quite a bit in PageRank calculation, so with hundreds of little sites all pointing to eat.ch, you can imagine there would be an SEO impact. If I read Google’s webspam info page correctly, this would fall under forbidden practices (ie, “Blackhat SEO”). Somewhere between “parked domains” and “paid links”. Checking the code, however, I noticed that all the links back to eat.ch are rel="nofollow", except the link to the menu. Honest oversight, or a way to sneak through the rules with only one link that “counts” for PageRank, to avoid triggering webspam alerts? Hard to say.

In any case, these placeholder sites drive PageRank, traffic, and online orders to eat.ch, who probably make a cut from any online order through their site. So you can see that even with only one “countable” link to eat.ch, this is a way to boost their business in a debatable way.

So: is what they are doing wrong, or just borderline?

If any SEO experts want to weigh in, please do!

8 thoughts on “Eat.ch and Hundreds of Placeholder Sites? [en]

  1. Eat.ch is a joke… They overcharge the restaurant with high commossions, first they Take the customer that wants to Order trought the restaurants website away and then they make the Restaurant to Pay for it.. They visited my friends place and said We are the best portal… Obviously by cheating they make money… Unbelievable that google doesnt do anything… Im sure they are spending 1000 of swiss francs every month in adwords so google keeps quiet…. Desaster

  2. Bah, de la bonne pratique de sites satellites et autres affiliations, courant dans les annuaires, les sites de comparateurs de prix, les ventes en ligne, etc.

    Tant que les liens vers eat.ch sont en no-follow, ça me semble safe du point de vue de Google. Mais à vérifier, je ne fréquente plus trop WRI et les autres forums SEO! Voir par exemple: http://www.webrankinfo.com/dossiers/strategies-de-liens/detection-liens-factices
    Le package http://www.eat.ch/info_kuriere.php proposé aux restaurateurs doit certainement comporter le mini-site contre la commission que eat.ch prend à chaque resto partenaire (plus de 700)
    http://whois.domaintools.com/bamboo-rorschach.ch

    Maintenant, si le resto a un site qui est moins bien référencé que sa page sur eat.ch, à lui de voir s’il veut continuer à être présent dans le catalogue, moyennant la commission qu’il donne à eat.ch J’imagine qu’il y trouve son compte, aussi grâce au positionnement (et adwords!) de eat.ch
    {my2cents}

  3. So customers are sucked in by Eat.ch instead of actually finding and interacting with local small businesses?!?! Google promotes and supports small businesses through Google Places for Business. If Google really does care about small businesses then surely it should penalise Eat.ch for stealing the customers of small businesses. Do Google know about the behaviour of Eat.ch?

  4. Salut Michelle

    On voit bien que vous travaillez pour eat.ch. C’est du spam et en plus je doit payer 10% sur tout les commandes et sur mon site cest gratuit. Arretez de mentir vous mettez les sites en ligne sans demander. Jai passé tout cela à mon avocat. Vous avez pas le droit de mettre une page qui envoie la commande chez eat.ch
    Vous êtes des voleurs

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *