Good Times at L'Estaminet

Updated 3/15, see below

From the looks of it, the ladies at L'Estaminet restaurant in Grand Case had someone build a new website for their upscale eatery. But, rather than spending money on something that is proven to work: a profile on DineSXM, they decided to go the amateur route.

Here is a little screenshot of the L'Estaminet SXM website, it very much looks like it's still a work in progress...

Note how there is no navigation, no information, no... anything! In other words, a rather useless attempt at designing a restaurant website. Putting it live before any content is visible actually harms the owners of the restaurant because it tells visitors that L'Estaminet doesn't have its act together yet. Meanwhile, their FREE DineSXM profile is dishing out all kinds of information about their place: address and phone number (of course), types of cuisine, restaurant description, images and even an interactive map to guide potential visitors straight to the restaurant. All that's missing is the ability to make online reservations...

But wait, there's more! It gets more fun. Good times to be had by (almost) all...

Instead of finishing the site before putting it online for the world to see, "somebody" decided to Googlebomb the keyword "L'Estaminet SXM" - no, really... As of January 18th, we've started seeing single page hits (bounces) for that particular keyword. Search engines are known to potentially interpret a bounce (when a visitor quickly leaves the page they followed after a search query) as a negative quality signal. These kinds of signals may sometimes lead to the page in question being ranked lower than normal for a specific query.

The funny thing is that the particular keyphrase "L'Estaminet SXM" is generating so many more visits than other phrases (normal ratio of visits per unique phrase is about 1.2) - which means that it became obvious really quick that someone is trying to mess with our position for that keyword. Other keywords related to the restaurant have a much lower bounce rate, and so there's another clear giveaway that the bounces are artificial.

Here's a little hint for anyone who would like to use blackhat tactics to bring DineSXM down a notch in the future: please use a bunch of proxies instead of your Caribserve / New Technologies, St. Maarten based ISP. This part makes you look REALLY stupid!

In any case, there are many restaurants in Grand Case that are worth a visit. This type of sneaky behavior makes it less likely that L'Estaminet will ever be one of them as far as we are concerned...

Update 3/15/2010

Whoops! That last two paragraphs came out a bit harsh. Not very professional of me, sorry! I'm blaming the late hour that I wrote original post at, and a bit of frustration considering that L'Estaminet would be a prime candidate for a successful profile on DineSXM. In more than two years of running the St. Maarten / St. Martin dining guide and reservations website, I have become pretty good at judging what types of restaurants would benefit the most from a prominent listing and letting their guests book online. L'Estaminet would most likely be among the top 5 or at least top 10 in terms of performance...

I also noticed that the phantom hits have now stopped again. Thanks, whoever you are, much appreciated! Here's a comparison between visits that came from regular searches for the restaurant and the mysterious bouncing traffic - just to illustrate how badly those phantom visits stuck out from the norm...