It’s all over the news http://www.eastbayexpress.com/eastbay/yelp-and-the-business-of-extortion-20/C… and I am glad that people are starting to publicly question the system. You watch their video and tell me why are their comments disabled? It’s because they do not want to hear what the consumers have to say. They do not care. They don’t want to hear the truth of what people are saying. Yelp is not necessary to spread the word thanks to youtube people can still tell the truth.
Jan
12
Yelp’s Review Filter
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9 comments
Renee says:
January 13, 2012 at 6:17 pm (UTC 0 )
Yelp created an account for my Business and allowed a client to create a negative comment that was NOT remotely true! Now they won’t delete my account and they keep hiding under the umbrella that my info is public info therefore they have the right to open an account under my name. This is extortion!!! YELP definately SUCKS!
I have not created an account with Yelp because I did not want an account and did not want to advertise with them because I think most of the comments of the reviews are friends and bogus!
I have tried to reason with Yelp but as of today they still refuse to take down my account, that again I did NOT want to did NOT create!!
Renee
Adryenn says:
January 13, 2012 at 11:49 pm (UTC 0 )
I feel you! At one point they had posted my very super secret phone number. And wouldn’t change it. I have a public phone I always answer, but this was my bat phone, high end clients only! I know of many people who have had their accounts delisted. The page is still there, but the search is turned off making it virtually invisible. You might want to ask about that…
Madder than heck says:
January 18, 2012 at 10:23 pm (UTC 0 )
Yelp does suck – they lead me astray and because of glowing reviews I did business iwth a company that is terrible and hiding lawsuits against them . WhenI complained to yelp and put down a review of 1/5 stars they send me a form response and then proceeded to take down my review
Yelp sucks – maybe someone should sue them for leading people astray
Adryenn says:
January 19, 2012 at 5:08 pm (UTC 0 )
See the comments below. The media are looking for stories like this. So if you are willing to share your identity, you should contact them!
Nancy Stern says:
January 24, 2012 at 6:13 pm (UTC 0 )
Adryenn I have a big problem with Yelp. They have filtered every one of my good reviews and will ONLY keep the bad ones up. They called and asked if I would advertise with them and I said no, and I am wondering if this is the problem. I have seen my positive reviews and looked at the reviewers profile. They have keep all their other positive reviews on other businesses, but have filtered my businesses review. I have contacted Yelp and told them several of my bad reviews were false and untrue, but they did not care. Also some of the horrible reviews and made by people who have glowing reviews from my compeditors. These bad reviews are hurting my business in so many ways. People call constantly and tell me they have read the reviews and are not sure if they should come to my business becasue of them. What can I do? There filtering system is so wrong. They claim the reviews are from “real” people. It couldn’t be more false..
robert says:
January 26, 2012 at 9:39 pm (UTC 0 )
Lots of good reviews are filtered and they leave reviews by people who appear to be angry, immature people. It’s not clear to me how this site benefits consumers or businesses that want to advertise. I saw one where an elite reviewer basically called business owner a bitch who came to work on a tampon. Nice.
Ed says:
February 4, 2012 at 1:37 pm (UTC 0 )
Wow !
I am astonished by these comments
I was looking to have a little whine about why yelp only show one review and hides 11 for our website (all of them good). I quickly sensed they are playing the role of corporate bully who speaks with forked tongue (ie their FAQs do not answer their own questions, and they aren’t contactable). So thought I’d google to see if there was any solution and I found this !
Guys you should look seriously at some type of class action lawsuit. You need to take this goliath down and soon.
I’m in the UK so am not sure but I thought in the US you’ve got a lot of lawyers who work on a no win no fee basis and who want to make their names…
wow it’s so sad that a resource people should be able to trust is being so badly run. My thoughts are with you !
C says:
February 16, 2012 at 10:28 pm (UTC 0 )
Same thing has happened to me, they keep filtering all of my reviews from actual real clients. There is no rhyme or reason as to why they keep doing this. Meanwhile my competitors who are advertising with them have their reviews (less than my filtered ones) up and running. It seems to me like the filter chooses to filter reviews for people who refuse to give them money. I guess it is the age of cyber-extorsion.
Adryenn Ashley says:
February 16, 2012 at 11:37 pm (UTC 0 )
Unfortunately it’s not as clean cut as pay for advertising and get your filtered reviews back. Based on a lot of experiments, it does appear that if you complain, you get penalized. It does look like if you piss off an elite or someone who works there, your reviews get whacked. No solid proof, but tons of anecdotal. Like the tattoo parlor with all positive reviews from real people are filtered and two negatives (one who claimed to be a Yelp employee) is unfiltered.
Based on how I have seen certain businesses profiles handled, I can safely bet there is a manual feature to the filter, it’s not random, and it’s not evenly applied. Kind of like a credit score (I used to work at Fair, Isaac doing the validation studies on the behavior scorecards my department built), there are factors that can lower your score, and factors that can raise it. Long time avid yelpers have more power, obviously, because they spend more time on the site, contributing to the community. I’m less concerned with that, than I am with the in-house factors that affect the score. That’s the black box. That’s where the magic happens and since it doesn’t happen the same across the board to equally situated businesses, either there is a major flaw (making the filtered results statistically irrelevant), or there is a way to manually manipulate the results.
Since my business is manually suppressed, I know for a fact that they can manipulate the results. How far that power goes is where the lawyers will find their smoking gun. But it isn’t a payola scheme anymore, and the advertising department doesn’t have the power to unfilter reviews, so don’t bother paying them.