Similar domains using my business' content, and stealing SEO results
- by Murciano
I've been hired to create a website for a restaurant in my city, let's call it "Flying Dragon" Chinese restaurant. The restaurant has never had a website, though the business itself is about ten years old. However, if you Google the restaurant's name, the first site that comes up seems to be affiliated with the restaurant itself, even though it is not. This site - let's say, flyingdragonchinese.com - is also the one that Google has apparently selected, in its results, to be the official website of the restaurant - in essence, the first Google result is flyingdragonchinese.com, and directly beneath it, within the same entry, are the Google reviews and contact information.
Upon visiting flyingdragonchinese.com (again, not the actual name), I see that the website has taken the menu content from the restaurant, in the same manner that Yelp does, but it also seems (to the untrained eye) to be the restaurant's official site. Basically, someone has created a fake website for the business (I am not sure why) using its actual menu and contact information, and is hogging the search results. The concept is similar to a "scraping site" except that the information seems to have been stolen manually. The main problem is that visitors to this site will have an inaccurate impression of the restaurant.
I feel like the obvious solution is to register a new domain for my site, and simply beat out this competitor (or whatever it is) with smarter SEO and business verification with Google. However, the Conan-the-Barbarian-web-designer part of me wants to somehow bash this other site (deservedly?) into oblivion. But I don't know what I can really do, besides maybe issuing a cease-and-desist letter, or trying to contact the web host for the site, although there is no contact information available on this "fake" site for the site owner.
Has anyone ever experienced something like this? Is there any solution?
