My buddy has a small business. He has a 2.5 star review on yelp. He has one 5 star and one 1 star review. The yelp guy that stopped by his store told him that there are fifteen 5 star reviews in the que but not approved yet. The yelp guy told my buddy that if he paid money to yelp and signed up, that they'd "expedite" the rest of the reviews.

Isn't that some stuff?

Im not saying that isn't true, but the guy had a yelp shirt on and handed out yelp business cards.

We have Yelp reps call us monthly trying to get us to sign up for the scam, but have never had one personally show up. My ex worked at Yelp and she always described things as basically the reps constantly calling their accounts, but never mentioned personal visits. As much as I despise Yelp, and how damaging they can intentionally be to businesses in order to steal their money to "fix their bad reviews," I'm not sure I'm buying the validity of this story.

I suppose they could be changing their approach to make them even more slimy than they already are. I'd be curious how this turns out, and hope you update on if anything comes of it. They're a scumbag company, so I wouldn't put it past them to do this.

For sure a scam and not related to Yelp. You can easily see any and all reviews as a member of the public or as the business owner. There are no reviews in waiting that are not visible.

Yelp does have an algorithm that hides reviews they don't think are real, though. It can be super frustrating, but the longer we've been on Yelp, the less frustrating it has been as I have seen how it plays out. Typically the reviews that get hidden are people who have little presence on Yelp, are close contacts to me as the owner (clients who are also friends on other social media platforms), people who have written reviews from the same IP address (had a husband and wife both write a review of our business, and both were flagged).

In the end, it seems fairly legit, but it was frustrating as hell when we had little Yelp presence and what we knew was a legit review would get flagged and put in the questionable section. We started paying Yelp in order to host a video on our page, and we actually had an uptick in flagged reviews after that. Seems to totally counter the "pay for play" accusations with Yelp because we were actually getting worse treatment once we started paying them.

Yelp does call frequently to try to get you to increase your marketing presence, but they are the least shady of the sites that solicit us as a home services company. Angies List and Home Advisor are the worst, as they are really gross and disingenuous with the way they do business.

Yelp has been the primary accelerator that has taken us from a 1 person company to a 25 person company, so I obviously have little to complain about.

Yelp was sued for this in 2014 in NY and the appeals court judge upheld Yelp's side of the case. I believe there is still another lawsuit against them at the California Supreme Court over the same thing. They absolutely do this, it's common practice. Their argument is that it's free speech online.

I use yelp a ton.

Maroon Stormtrooper said:

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My buddy has a small business. He has a 2.5 star review on yelp. He has one 5 star and one 1 star review. The yelp guy that stopped by his store told him that there are fifteen 5 star reviews in the que but not approved yet. The yelp guy told my buddy that if he paid money to yelp and signed up, that they'd "expedite" the rest of the reviews.

Isn't that some stuff?

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Can you do a review of your buddy's business, and see if it gets posted in a day or two?
That would at least check to see if the reviews are being held back.

Yelp is horrible, I've had good reviews "filtered" because I refuse to pay for their services. I make sure to tell my customers about yelp and advise them to use other websites because of this

I've never had an issue with Yelp at any of my stores. The reviews pop up just fine. Google has been a crap shoot but still pretty good. Some of my competitors have obviously used services to help them boost their review ratings. For example, one shop had three reviews in 6 years, all were bad and then within one month they have 23 that were all 5 star.

03ki11erAG said:

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I've never had an issue with Yelp at any of my stores. The reviews pop up just fine. Google has been a crap shoot but still pretty good. Some of my competitors have obviously used services to help them boost their review ratings. For example, one shop had three reviews in 6 years, all were bad and then within one month they have 23 that were all 5 star.

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A lot will also bribe people to write good reviews by offering discounts and such in exchange for reviews. That's definitely not allowed, but I suppose it's hard to enforce.
I'm not willing to bribe clients or pay off Yelp, so I'll just pretend none of this crap exists and do my damn job.

My favorite method of dealing with Yelp (and more importantly, the reviewers) was a restaurant here in San Francisco that started offering free appetizers in exchange for bad reviews. So in essence any real one star reviews were diluted by all the joke reviews, basically making the whole system irrelevant. No restaurant can be a 1 star rating and stay in business, so anyone reading it knows it a joke. If I had bigger balls I'd do something like this, if only as a big FU to Yelp. Maybe if my rating wasn't good I'd do it.

There is a comedy special on HBO by Al Madrigal entitled "Shrimpin Ain't Easy" and he has a hilarious bit about YELP. The entire show is hilarious.

We deal with the same thing with our business. We have atleast 15 hidden reviews. I think they once told me if I sign up for advertisements they will become available. For now they are stuck behind a click at the very bottom of the reviews. that says "16 other reviews that are not currently recommended "

All of those reviews were written by people that only signed up for yelp to write you a review. That doesn't discount their legitimacy, but one of the primary things Yelps algorithm takes into account is the yelp presence of the person writing the review. If those reviewers added friends and wrote more reviews, they would likely become public.

No one from yelp would have told you that. It's either a scam, you're imagining it, or it's a rogue employee using an unscrupulous sales tactic because it's not true.

Thx for the enlightenment!

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All of those reviews were written by people that only signed up for yelp to write you a review. That doesn't discount their legitimacy, but one of the primary things Yelps algorithm takes into account is the yelp presence of the person writing the review. If those reviewers added friends and wrote more reviews, they would likely become public.

No one from yelp would have told you that. It's either a scam, you're imagining it, or it's a rogue employee using an unscrupulous sales tactic because it's not true.

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This is the problem, the good thing is many more people are not worrying about Yelp and using Facebook reviews instead. Yelp is still a player, but a joke in the restaurant community.

MPython43 said:

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All of those reviews were written by people that only signed up for yelp to write you a review. That doesn't discount their legitimacy, but one of the primary things Yelps algorithm takes into account is the yelp presence of the person writing the review. If those reviewers added friends and wrote more reviews, they would likely become public.

No one from yelp would have told you that. It's either a scam, you're imagining it, or it's a rogue employee using an unscrupulous sales tactic because it's not true.

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Nope. About half have 1 or 2 reviews. The other half have at least 30, and all are positive reviews of us.

n_touch said:

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Quote:

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All of those reviews were written by people that only signed up for yelp to write you a review. That doesn't discount their legitimacy, but one of the primary things Yelps algorithm takes into account is the yelp presence of the person writing the review. If those reviewers added friends and wrote more reviews, they would likely become public.

No one from yelp would have told you that. It's either a scam, you're imagining it, or it's a rogue employee using an unscrupulous sales tactic because it's not true.

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This is the problem, the good thing is many more people are not worrying about Yelp and using Facebook reviews instead. Yelp is still a player, but a joke in the restaurant community.

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Depends on the market. Here in SF, these dumbass techy hipsters won't walk down a sidewalk or go to a park without checking its reviews first. They rely on other people's opinions to live their lives. It would be laughable if it didn't actually impact so many businesses.

Yelp is a scam always has been. Awful.

It's not exactly the same but I use trip advisor if anything. I consider Yelp to be complete trash and typically lies.

Bald Messiah said:

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You want a yelp shirt? I can get you a yelp shirt, believe me. There are ways, Dude. You don't wanna know about it, believe me. Hell, I can get you a yelp shirt by 3 o'clock this afternoon... with nail polish.

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We're supposed to be scared? f-in amateurs.