Why Yelp.com Sucks?
January 10, 2011 21 Comments
Today, I go through my bookmarks and find out this document. I had it bookmarked but that was before I start the blog. This time it is about the doctor, restaurant, local business review site Yelp.com
look at this doc.
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/29782029/Boris-Levitt-Vs-Yelp
after doing some research, it appears that it is not the first, neither the last legal suit that Yelp.com is getting.
Basically from the document, small business owner Boris Levitt of Renaissance Furniture Restoration is suing Yelp, accusing Yelp.com of removing a lot of the positive reviews after refusing to pay for the advertisements.The business owner claims that after refusing to advertise on Yelp, a large number of 5 stars reviews are removed.
Similar to this, nine small businesses from across the United States have joined the Beck & Lee and Weston suit, including The Bleeding Heart Bakery in Chicago; Bleeding Heart Bakery of Chicago, Illinois; Scion Restaurant of Washington, D.C.; J.L. Ferri Entertainment, Inc. of New York, New York; Sofa Outlet of San Mateo, California; Celibré, Inc. of Torrance, California; Astro Appliance Service of San Carlos, California; Wag My Tail, Inc., of Tujunga, California; Le Petite Retreat, of Los Angeles, California and Mermaids Cruise of San Francisco, California
I think these are just the tips of an ice berg, or lots of icebergs. By focusing on this, here are some of the comments I find online related to this.
I manage the website for a gym. Here is my experience with Yelp. Our gym had about a dozen reviews on Yelp. 10 were positive. 2 were good. We ran a 6-month campaign on Yelp and it cost a couple thousand bucks. I checked out our analytics and we got minimal traffic and only one conversion. So we called Yelp and politely said thanks but we’re not going to renew the contract. About a month later, all of a sudden, there were 4 positive and 8 negative reviews. The negative reviews didn’t even make any sense. For example one review said that “the pool sucked”. Funny. Our gym doesn’t have a pool. Plus the negative posters had no other Yelp reviews. About the same time a Yelp salesperson called and said very cryptically if we ran an ad campaign they could talk to the “person in charge of the algorithm” and see if the positive reviews could be spotlighted a little more. Honestly, I thought I was talking to a Tony Soprano in training.
Our business had the same experience. As soon as we declined to pay yelp, negative reviews started showing up and positive ones do not show up anymore. Nothing has changed except our declining to pay them.
We are just a mom and pop operation, and we don’t have the resources to investigate this, but we strongly believe the allegations in this story reflect our own experience, and hope these people are able to get answers about yelp’s business practices.
It is normal to have some mixed reviews. However, when there is an abrupt change to all negative it really raises a red flag.
Yelp is terrible & I will NEVER rely upon their reviews ever again.
I went to a hair salon that had rave reviews & I started losing my hair after that.
I spent over an hour writing up my negative review & a few months later I happened to be on their site & saw that it’s removed.
I e-mailed them & they claimed it’s b/c the review could have been spam.
LOL, who spends over an hour on a spam review?
Happened again, I posted another negative review on someone else’s profile & I just went to look now & it’s gone.
It’s absolutely ridiculous.
YELP IS A TOTAL SCAM – ABSOLUTE EXTORTION. THE COMPANIES THAT PAY THEM OFF, GET ROYAL TREATMENT. BUT FOR THOSE COMPANIES WHO WON’T PAY YELP, THEY GET PUNISHED. I had the same experience as many people on this thread. But I was the screwed customer, not the punished company owner. YELP’s scam works for them in BOTH ways. If you post a legitimate and negative review of a company that has screwed you (in my case, I was ripped off for $1,3500 in one fell swoop), but if that company is PAYING YELP, they get an INSTANT message telling the company of your review so they can see it for themselves and then the comment is removed by YELP. Within minutes of posting my sincere review of a company that ripped me off on YELP, someone clicked on “funny” as a response to my comment, which was not funny at all, instead of the other choice which was “helpful.” But how many people would be doing a YELP search for a company called “Compatible Introductions” right after I have submitted my review about it? And within a few days, my comment, that I spent nearly an hour carefully composing to give every detail as though it were going to be used in a court of law, had been deleted. My comment was clearly not spam so I think it was incredibly UNETHICAL of YELP to remove it. As someone said above, what spammer is going to spend an hour on a very detailed review of a company unless he/she received truly HORRIBLE or FANTASTIC service?? YELP IS SUCH A SCAM. IT MADE BEING SCREWED OUT OF $1,300 ALL THE MORE PAINFUL WHEN MY REVIEW WAS DELETED. I can’t afford an attorney to get that money back. I thought at LEAST I could warn others who were considering using that dishonest company but YELP even stole THAT from me. YELP is bad for both good companies who refuse to pay the extortion AND it is bad for consumers who wrongly assume that YELP is an honest broker. I will post both of my comments down below so you can read what I wrote about “Compatible Introductions” a bogus “dating service” here in Vancouver BC. They basically take the $1,300 and then they email you the names and phone numbers of 10 guys who live in your city who are around your same age and call that “compatible.” Wow! Was I ever embarrassed and angry when I realized I had been duped out of so much money in exchange for the names of 10 guys who had absolutely NOTHING in common with me. And I had spent hours filling out a 5 page questionnaire prior to paying them all that money, assuming that the information I was giving them about myself and what I was looking for in a relationship was even going to be read or used in any way for determining real compatibility. But it was not used. I doubt they even read any of my questionaire answers. It was simply the ploy to give you the impression that it was a serious dating service, which it is not. If you are in Vancouver BC, do not even think of giving Compatible Introductions dating service $1,300 because you will get nothing in exchange for it. They will be sweet as honey before they get the money during their one hour interview of you. But AFTER they get your money, they are FINISHED with you. Be warned.
I totally believe that Yelp is the new mob. I use it all the time in San Francisco to find restaurants, contractors, and service providers for the business I own. In the last 3 or 4 months, I’ve talked to 3 business owners who complained about Yelp, wondering why their positive reviews have disappeared. So they’re complaining to me about the service that helped me find them.
I even noticed that positive reviews were disappearing from accounting firms I was considering using. I bookmarked their listings and remembered a few positive reviews. When I went back to those bookmarks a couple of months later, several positive reviews were gone. I find it hard to believe that Yelp’s algorithm flagged astroturfing because these businesses each had less than 5 reviews total.
When Yelp’s salespeople call my business, I’m not talking to them.
I think enough said here. It appears that the review site Yelp.com is accused of exercising the same practice as BBB Better Business Bureau.
It leads me to think that this is the nature of the business. These product review and rating, business review and rating, service rating and review business requires lots of resources, and they usually have lots of funding because the future of the business. However, the pressure of profitable makes these companies to go the wrong way.
They will leverage whatever they have to milk their potential customers. And the most convenient leverage they have is the business reputation, personal reputation of these business and professionals.
I am not a very smart person, I don’t know and don’t have the answer for this. But one thing I can think of is to keep the operation small, and operate it with a mind to help the people you are serving, which is the consumers and the businesses. However, I know I am contradicting myself, how can you operate a successful business and sustain the services without aiming for a profit?
I am going to think about it.
btw, I don’t know if my findings above are the extreme case of Yelp.com, if you have good experience about what you like of Yelp.com, do let me know.
I found this informative post about Yelp after seeing that Yelp deleted ALL the reviews for my business. And yes, I did not advertise with them. That decent clients took the time to write those reviews in good faith, only to have them disappear, speaks volumes for the wretches that run Yelp. Unfortunately, Yelp reviews DO bring clients. There’s the rub. I hope they get the pants sued off them.
i agree with all, we had a now everything intern at our store in Tuvson, we showed him the door and he has now filtered all favorable comments claiming the store
HERE IS A WAY TO FIGHT BACK YELP !!!
Yelp is a website that claims to offer people a fair reviews of buisness, when in fact, they mislead people by only showing negative reviews, while ‘filtering’ all good reviews, UNLESS, that bussiness pays them money, then the show good reviews and ‘filter’ bad ones.That is very unfair to the public
To fight back against this injustice, everyone should file a complaint against Yelp at the Better Business Bureau, https://www.bbb.org/file-a-complaint if enough people file, something can be done!!!
Could not agree with you more! They intentionally left ridiculous reviews from disgruntled employees and got rid of honest reviews from actual customers. I could hardly believe it! You have no choice but to join so that you at least have a voice to protect your business, but their business pratices are questionable to say the least. In no way could you possibly be getting a fair review for any business you search. If they could just be decent and honest they could have quite a thing there. Shame. I’ll be filing a complaint with the bbb on behalf of the business in question.
Last weekend, my family and I went to a restaurant based on a five star rating by Yelp, and it turned out to be the worst dining experience ever. Not only the food was terrible the table wasn’t even cleaned properly. The water glasses had dirty marks and the restroom was down right unsanitary. How could Yelp review be so wrong? DO NOT ever trust Yelp reviews.
Yelp has hurt my business – I have had to go on and “respond” to a bunch of crazy unwarranted negative reviews
can you tell more about how it hurts your business? I want to know, and I am sure more want to know.
Great article by the way
if you’ve had any experience with yelp and your own small business… you know.
Agreed, Yelp is terrible. Our business also has several reviews on Yelp, all are positive except one. Of course they kept the negative one and filtered all the others. Please keep in mind we had nothing to do with the reviews, all are legit, one even coming from the Food Network! I emailed Yelp asking them to review my filters however received this lame response see below:
(in a nut shell, Yelp will not publish reviews unless the person is established or has a history with Yelp, which is very unfair, especially to the person that took the time to write a review about your business)
Thanks for contacting Yelp about your reviews.
The review filter sometimes affects legitimate reviews, especially those from less established reviewers. Since fake reviews rarely announce themselves on their face, the filter is left to look at other signals and work with the information at hand. We think it does a pretty good job given the sheer volume of reviews and the surprising number of people out there trying to game the system to benefit their own business or hurt someone else’s, though there’s always room for improvement.
It’s worth remembering that the filter isn’t static – the reviews that it filters today may not be the same reviews that it filters tomorrow as it constantly assesses and reassesses different trust factors. As a result, filtered reviews may find their way back onto your main profile page as the reviewers become more established on Yelp.
YELP continues to filter out many or all of the positive reviews of my business ( just go to the ‘filtered review’ list and they are ALL positive. THey leave the negative reviews and position the negative reviews (even though they are older in chronology) to be seen first. I declined to advertise with them last spring when they called me and since then they have escalated this practice against my business. They need to be exposed for their manipulation. Any suggestions?
I spent several hours with a sales rep at Yelp trying to up-sell me into an elaborate $350 advertising package. My final answer was no. I then moved my office and updated my address on my current free Yelp ad. The changes have been ‘locked’ for two weeks and still not updated. (I had a new client find me on Yelp but ended up at the wrong address.) A note appears on Yelp saying that staff has approved it yet the old address still appears. I went in and added a review noting the new address. Immediately the review was pulled as inappropriate. Yet the old address is still there with no correction. Hmmmm – They can yank the review but they can’t fix the address. Glad I didn’t spend the money on any paid advertising with them if this is the quality of service you get.
After reading all your comments, I have the feeling we are all in the same boat. Yelp is pretty much doing what they want and we as business owners feel helpless. We had the same happening to us. Many good reviews, things were going good, canceled advertising, now we only show 12 out of 70 reviews on most of them are either bad or really old. Pushed us to page three and business went down drastically. Had to lay off two people. So Yelp is not just hurting my business, it is also hurting the overall economy. At this point I am so small that I can’t afford to sue a big company like Yelp. However, it seems that there is a lot of small companies like me that feel violated. It has been done before. Yelp was not happy being being involved in a class action suit. Why not do it again? I think together we could all make a difference. Just sitting here and crying about our problem with Yelp is probably not going to change much. I think we need to the legal way and get their attention. Yelp is not afraid of the small business owner, however a lot of small business owners together could get a loud voice! I am definitely fed up with it. If someone is interested in forming a group, please let me know, I am in!
You\’re the grteeast! JMHO
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Yelp solicits my business at least 1-2 times/month. I refuse to sign up for their ad/sponsorship progam, aka extortion fees. Guess what has happened? Yup, you got it, all my positive reviews are filtered, all the negative ones are left for the whole world to see.
Help in the fight against yelp. Please join me on my facebook page, http://www.facebook.com/yelpisafraud and let’s fight together.
Yelp is truly a fraud.
I’m having the same issue with Yelp. Positive review “great reviews” are not showing up and 2 by people who say they are “clients” but are not are showing up. There’s got to be away to fight back with yelp.
This is your best way to fight back. The more you share your experience online the more it is indexed and the more it shows up in anything involving yelp.
Yes, this is a good way to fight back. Also, feel free to check out my Facebook page, http://www.facebook.com/yelpisafraud. We have a lot of people, more joining each day. We share our Yelp Problems and Yelp Complaints. Also, I try to post “tips and tricks” whenever possible. There is some good info there, check it out.
Again, the more people who know about yelp, the more people will stop using Yelp. Without people, there will be no more Yelp.
Remember, Yelp is a Four Letter Word!
Yelp is very terrible. They filtered my reviews that I wrote about certain businesses and I hate that.
Yelp gives a voice to a bunch of nobodies whose only existence is online. They use it to extort freebies and discounts from honest, hard-working small businesses. They expect their behinds to be kissed and polished because they have the power to hurt your business anonymously. Here’s a random example. Look up Rachel Thoele of Oakland California on Yelp. All bad one-star reviews unless the business was extorted into giving her whatever she demands. Scum empowered by Yelp!