HACKER Q&A
📣 aaomidi

Why are all the chiropractors near me 5 stars on Google Maps?


Also, who makes the website for all of these practices? They look pretty similar.


  👤 cookiengineer Accepted Answer ✓
Usually there's a gateway scam aka other marketing companies take over the google business pages in an automated manner.

In Germany, the "lieferando" people registered hundreds of thousand domains for restaurants, and claimed their google business pages. So when people try to call them directly, they still land at lieferando's order service.

This is the method they use to extort restaurants that aren't on the web and force them to go on their platform, without leaving them any alternative because the marketing company still controls their google business pages; which of course means the restaurant will never get orders if the marketing company takes that one down or enters it as "closed" or untrustworthy with artificial downvotes.

It's basically foursquare and yelp all over again.

If you are more curious about this, there's the crimeflare project which was basically hosting a resolver and scraped it for all domains that are hosted on the ASN of cloudflare because those kind of scammer companies and/or blackhats usually use cloudflare to host their stuff.


👤 pmg1991
Offer cash back or discounts if given 5 star rating. People will definitely take the offer. Many restaurants and businesses do that at the time of billing.