I would like very much to grab my pitchfork and point it menacingly at Yelp, but I have yet to see one of these stories with hard evidence.
There are many, many stories of bad (and incriminating) behavior on behalf of Yelp salespeople over the phone, but I have never heard a recording. Even though most claims indicate that the harassing calls are repeated many times. Somebody record one of these calls and become Internet famous!
There are also many stories like this one that should come with before/after screenshots or links to an archived page. They need to actually link to the page in question so we can see if they are accurately depicting the situation. Shill reviews are easily spotted by people who have the necessary experience.
Like I said, I am ready to turn around on Yelp, these stories sound very plausible to me. I haven't yet seen sufficient evidence. The fact is that I do use that service and the subset of restaurants that I know very well have reviews that match my experience with the place. Therefore I can't help but think that perhaps the person who write the linked article is perhaps deserving of bad reviews and doesn't want to admit it.
A business I used recently for some tree maintenance in my town had a 1-star Yelp review which was perplexing. In this case, the business and owner are well-known in the area as one of the best at what they do and top subject matter experts.
While digging a little, I found that Yelp was highlighting only the four 1-star reviews and factoring only those into the score. Each of these reviews is responded to by the owner with an explanation, all of which look fairly reasonable to me.
Below this, hidden away under a link and not factored into the score were 15 other reviews that Yelp tagged as 'not currently recommended'. These reviews span a period of 4-5 years+ and are mostly positive 4-5 star reviews. I am no expert but they do not look faked at all to me. Why would this be the case? This business also had 42 5-star reviews on Google. Seems a little odd to me and this really swayed my opinion for good on Yelp.
Were the one-star reviews the most recent ones? it seems like a fairly reasonable optimization that if the average score takes a sharp trend in any direction, reviews from before that trend started shouldn't be counted in the score.
If this is true, wouldn't it be pretty easy to write some sort of scraper that pulls all of this information from both yelp and google and reveals such discrepancies?
You and your facts, proof, and blood-samply hocus-pocus. Yelp is obviously a witch, and these very sophisticated small business owners uncover their racket every month. Burn them!
One thing that Yelp absolutely does do, I've seen it with my own eyes, is play with 'recommended' reviews based on whether the business in question is paying them. I can't provide hard links because it's a client of my wife's business.
Specifically, a business had about 20 very positive reviews in total, all of them 'recommended'. A review that isn't 'recommended' basically doesn't exist; it doesn't count toward the average rating and it can only be viewed if a small print, difficult to see link at the bottom is clicked.
So, a business started with 20 total rating, and all 20 of them 'recommended', with a very good average rating.
Said business decides to send some money Yelp's way; that goes on for a few months, and they get a minimal uptick in hits, but worth less than what's being sent to Yelp.
So they (within the contract with Yelp) stop that relationship.
Shortly after, 75% of the reviews switch to 'not recommended'; the ones that remain are among the lowest ratings. The new average for the business isn't terrible, but it's lower.
Multiple calls to Yelp are all handled basically the same; "That's just an algorithm and we don't really control it." ... "I think if you re-establish your contract with us, you might get more business."
The language on the phone is tricky; nowhere is a direct connection between sending money and 'fixing' the Yelp score mentioned. But it's heavily implied. When asked directly, they just deflect talking about the opaque 'algorithm.'
That was the most recent case my wife dealt with. There have been at least two other fairly similar situations.
At this point, she's telling her clients that it can be dangerous to engage with Yelp if they haven't already done so.
We were just discussing this with my wife yesterday. The very same story happened to our doula, who's very non-technical and she asked us what to do (we are both engineers). Short story: she had a profile on Yelp, almost 20 5-star reviews from former customers (who spend, on average, 2/3 months with her - so each star is a big deal). One day Yelp! connects with her proposing her to become a paid customer, how could that boost her visibility, etc. etc. Moreover, she has great reviews and it would be good for her to maintain that track record. She declines - also because she is not very technical and she has no idea how much business she's getting from Yelp. Within a month, half of her 5-star reviews are gone and 2 1-star reviews appeared (that she does not recollect as customers - so she reported them).
My get on the entire story is that Yelp sounds a lot like Italian's mafia (btw, I'm Italian) - where "you have a really nice restaurant there, it'd be a shame if something bad would happen to it. But if you pay us, you'd have nothing to worry about."
In my wife's correspondences with Yelp (via voice and e-mail) on behalf of her clients, they kept focusing on that word 'algorithm'....like it's some magical, mystical thing that nobody really understands or controls. That was the key word that was used in all of the bullshit deflections.
Thing is, Yelp is absolutely dominant in this space, so we're all kind of stuck with it.
Not if they are exposed to the general public by way of recording / hard proof, as the original commenter said. Once people know they are lying scum, their dominance will fall.
I really don't know how they became so dominant, but Yelp is basically The Way my family and tons of people we know find services, restaurants, and the like. We live in the SF Bay Area; I don't know how widely applicable it is, but based on the work my wife has done with her customers (all over the US), Yelp is generally pretty important everywhere in a lot of sectors.
Your standard of proof is very high. Who records all of their phone calls (presumably without consent which is illegal in my jurisdiction) and makes an archive of their yelp page periodically?
This is not the only company to face such allegations and afaik it's not the first time yelp has been accused either. I think you'll have to base this one on anecdotal stories.
I think they were not saying that everyone has to record their conversations as a matter of course, but that no one making these allegations has any hard proof. They even mentioned that in many of these stories, Yelp is calling them multiple times - it would be nice if next time this happens to someone in a 1-party consent state, they would record the second call from Yelp.
In my experience, almost all stories get bigger in the retelling, especially when you have a grievance, having some hard proof at least helps to give you a baseline assessment of how much of an exaggeration the claims are.
If they are calling from California, they are covered by the 2-party consent state law. It's very easy to get accused of wiretapping under these laws, so watch out. Last, even if you get such a recording, it'd be an unnamed guy saying stuff on behalf of Yelp. You'd still have to proof it's a legitimate recording, from a legitimate phone call with Yelp.
What people accuse Yelp of doing is pretty close to racketeering (or is? IANAL) and thus there is a high burden of proof. As a sibling comment points out, not every accusation needs detailed proof but some do and despite the years of accusations there isn't any definitive proof.
Also, look at the information you've seen about bad practices at Uber recently. I'm aware my next statement is pretty weak reasoning, but if Uber with all its money and talent has these problems out in the open what makes you think Yelp would be that much better at keeping this a secret?
Uber's problems are internal or started with disgruntled internal employees, Yelp's problems are External, Completely different.
>>What people accuse Yelp of doing is pretty close to racketeering (or is? IANAL) and thus there is a high burden of proof.
Where there is smoke there is likely fire. I am probably not willing to believe it is corporate mandate with the evidence shown, however I can see a Wells Fargo style situation where perverse sales incentives combined with lacking internal controls allows for Sales people and Middle Managers to cause some of these issues that have been reported.
Exactly. When I heard the first accusations against Bill Cosby, I was skeptical. I thought "innocent until proven guilty". But then after accuser number 50 came around, I find the accusations very likely true. Even though there is no hard proof.
Without proof you may still be innocent in the eyes of the law, but if I was a young lady, I sure wouldn't be anywhere around him alone.
In Italy, where racketeering is very common in the South, we have special laws and protections to fight it - because proving it, it is not easy at all. You get threats that are implied and not explicit. If "something happens" you cannot automatically ascribe it to the former threat. It should be the role of an investigative agency to look into that and discover the high burden of proof, not of private citizens.
their phone calls (presumably without consent which is illegal in my jurisdiction)
IANAL, but if the call starts out with the standard, "Please note that this call is being recorded for training and quality assurance purposes", or similar, then you are free to record that conversation and it would not be illegal. All parties to the call have been informed that the call is being recorded, and thus no wire tapping laws have been broken. This works for both 1 party and 2 party states as far as I'm aware.
Yes, I believe the "consent" is judged to have been given if a party continues the call after being informed that it is not a private, unrecorded call. So if one party announces that it's recording the call, all parties who continue the call (including the recording party) have supposedly consented to that breach of privacy.
It's probably also not that unusual for Yelp to call a business that plays this announcements to its incoming callers, and actually records them. I can only guess that we haven't seen this evidence because the offended business might have preferred to settle things in private.
This also could be simple mistake of users leaving a review on the wrong page. I see this done in both directions. Just yesterday I saw a 5-star review that raved about a restaurant, only at the end they were thanking a different restaurant.
> That said, it would be nice if someone presented some evidence to back up claims that yelp is doing something "corrupt".
This is an extremely difficult standard to meet. A lot of the accusations against Yelp involve phone calls with their sales reps, which is not public data that can be aggregated and parsed. All we really have to go on are anecdotes.
Speaking personally, I've heard from two people I know who have small businesses- a wedding photographer in Seattle and a small restaurant in Concord, New Hampshire- who separately told me how they had good Yelp reviews, and then watched them get pushed down and bad reviews pushed to the top shortly after they declined to buy Yelp ads. These two people didn't even know each their and would have no way or reason to coordinate their tales, and they told me identical stories. I never use Yelp anymore, for this reason.
Anecdotes might not be scientific data, but if the circumstances are such that scientific data is impossible to obtain, they're better than nothing.
A common internet poker conspiracy story goes like this, Player becomes very unlucky after withdrawing money from site, so obviously site is punishing them for withdrawing. But there is a huge amount of variance in poker, so you can be lucky or unlucky for extended periods without being targeted by the site. And, no one ever rushes to the internet to complain about getting extra lucky after they withdraw.
I have a yelp page for my small business. I got a call from their sales team, listened to the spiel, thought about it for a few days and decided it wouldn't be worth the investment. I told the salesperson so, and that was it. No harassment, no noticeable impact on my page. Just an anecdote... Maybe I'm too small a fish to be worth their trouble :)
I don't think anyone is making these stories up, but with tens of thousands of businesses on Yelp, the chances of these two events randomly happening sequentially is high enough to have a steady stream of people who think it happened to them intentionally.
Also, I've been reading these anecdotes on HN and other sites for years, and have never seen anyone tell this story and provide enough data for anyone to take a look themselves. Never a link to the business page on Yelp, never any links to the supposed negative reviews. Has a news organization ever asked Yelp to explain the specifics of any of these occurrences? Has any explanation ever turned up in the discovery phase of a case against Yelp?
He shows how he talked to a sales person at Yelp, received a bad review, which he proves is fake by showing a search from his CRM, than digs into the social media accounts of the Yelp sales person, and finds the yelp reviewer who left the bad review (but didn't have an invoice) was a friend of the sales person.
even if this is just a rouge yelp sales person, there is clearly something systematically wrong here.
I suspect that is because they're afraid that their 'two star reviews' become 'zero star reviews'. Just like you don't complain about Mafia customer service in public.
It's possible, but it's also possible that the owner doesn't really know if Yelp is actually guilty of anything, and they're afraid that an investigation would find that the reviews are legitimate, making the owner look bad.
In this litigious society, I'd imagine a plucky suit-sponsoring hedge fund would be excited to hear of all these instances of fraud. Yet I haven't heard of any class action.
It doesn't have to be that people are making stuff up. Yelp is a big site, and there will always be some people who have really bad luck, even if everyone's being honest. If popular opinion focuses on those stories, and no one really tells the stories of people who have good experiences (because why would you tell a boring story :p), it can sound like Yelp is making it happen deliberately.
It also doesn't require a coordinated conspiracy. Yelp salespeople are like anyone else...there are some a-holes in the bunch. They could, individually, make this sort of thing happen. Even without any admin access. A few fake accounts, or friends and family, etc.
I don't know, but there's no link to anything. Don't even know the name of the establishment. I can't change my consumer habits on the word of "that guy's friend"
A subset of restaurant owners will get negative reviews after cancellations, it doesn't necessarily mean that those two things are correlated. Neither the Reddit post, nor the comment you link to actually bother to link to these negative reviews. It would go a long way to show even the slightest bit of evidence.
It's possible that the friend made it up or exaggerated. Kind of like when you send your drunk friend home in an Uber and you get a bill for cleaning up vomit. Your friend insists they didn't, but it's plausible that they simply don't remember.
It'd be interesting to figure out how Yelp generates the negative reviews. I'd love to see somebody setup a "honeypot" business - fake, doesn't exist in real life (well, physically/location wise)... and then sign up with Yelp and then cancel. Do that with a good 10-100 fake businesses, and could you drum up a case against Yelp?
No problem. Just seed the Honeypot with fake reviews. Make 50% of the review positive and 50% negative. Then, check to see which reviews are favored on Yelp before and after signing up and cancelling service.
Via a bit of sleuthing, I managed to figure out what business this person is writing about. I could post a link to the Yelp page, but that feels a bit doxxy, so I don't know if it's appropriate.
The business does have more one-star reviews than one might normally expect, but the texts of the accompanying reviews contain specific details of complaints, and the complaints are appropriate for the ISP/TV category. For example:
Absolutely atrocious. I have never had a worse experience with a company. After multiple calls to service my internet connection they refused to accommodate me efficiently. The customer service representative was rude, disinterested, and frankly mean. On top of this, they have messed up my bill several times, and failed to rectify them even after acknowledging that they messed up the billing. The service was simply unacceptable. If you can avoid using them, by all means do.
A couple of the users' reviews do show cities outside of the business's city, but that could just be out-of-date user profiles, or people who have moved since they posted their reviews. The oldest of the one-star reviews appears to be April 2015. Of the reviews "not recommended" by Yelp (i.e., hidden by default), two are one-star and one is four-star.
My feeling is that these are not fake reviews, but rather that an ISP/TV service is a business quite unlikely to attract positive/neutral reviews. Personally it had never occurred to me to review any ISPs on Yelp, even those I liked. It seems likely that these are legitimately upset customers who realized they can use Yelp to harm the business they had a bad interaction with. So, if I am correct, these reviews are legitimate, but not representative.
Isn't it also possible that when you buy that plan from Yelp, they push your company more and that leads to more negative reviews along with positive ones? But as part of that agreement (they might not tell you they do it), they hide the negative ones (all or some, or maybe even only temporarily) so that your company thrives. If you thrive, Yelp thrives because they want your business to keep paying for Yelp and you are probably less likely to cancel if you see a bunch of 5 star reviews and few negative ones.
And maybe after a certain time they stop hiding the negative ones, or it could be as cynical as what the OP is sorta implying -- that Yelp begins showing all the negative reviews they were holding back once you stop paying? I'm not sure I believe Yelp is writing fraudulent negative reviews for companies because it would be so easy to prove and would be, well...fraud. But hiding negative reviews that were written by real people as long as you are paying Yelp does seem like something a company could justify to itself, however unethical it still is in my eyes.
> Isn't it also possible that when you buy that plan from Yelp, they push your company more and that leads to more negative reviews along with positive ones? But as part of that agreement (they might not tell you they do it), they hide the negative ones (all or some, or maybe even only temporarily) so that your company thrives.
Sure, it's possible that perverse incentives would drive Yelp to such rationalized missteps, my argument is that it would be easy to prove if it's true. But none of the complaining businesses have offered proof, only conjecture.
I'm not "calling bullshit" here, I'm just asking for evidence in a scenario where evidence should be easily accessible if it exists. Innocent until proven guilty, and all that.
The issue isn't that they're fake but that positive reviews end up hidden as 'not recommended' and negative ones suddenly float to the top once the protection money stops.
It looks like there's manipulation of the algorithm that determines what reviews are legitimate on a per client basis. The 'free' package is pretty unforgiving, but if you pay then its tweaked more towards your favor. Nothing about this would be illegal. Its how Yelp manages their site and I believe have already won a lawsuit against this.
Consumers need to be taught that Yelp isn't trustworthy. Sadly, it seems to have a Facebook-like network effect that'll be tough to beat. On the plus side Google reviews are the default on Google maps and other Google services and they seem to not play these games.
In this case, of the three "not recommended" reviews, one is positive (four stars) and two are negative (one star). This seems contrary to the common assertion that the bad reviews are all unleashed. Though I concede that if Yelp is guilty of the accusations, they might be smart about it, and leave some negative reviews hidden.
I'm just concerned that there is still no ready evidence that Yelp is doing this deliberately. I have seen no confirmed cases of hidden negative reviews suddenly being displayed after a contract is canceled, nor of previously displayed positive reviews becoming hidden, nor any compelling evidence that the negative reviews are disingenuous, nor any recorded communication from Yelp implying that paying up will improve reviews. I like assertions to be accompanied by appropriate evidence.
Consider: Most business owners pour their hearts and their lives into their businesses. But no business is perfect, and they will make mistakes that upset customers. Yelp encourages criticism. It sucks to have your life's work harshly criticized. So it's miles easier for business owners to accept that the negative reviews are fraudulent.
There is no evidence because there can be no evidence. Every single time this is shown with screenshots, Yelp says the same thing: that its proprietary algorith changes all the time. They get a free copout and all of its defenders on the web just parrot that statement.
Lower-ranked reviews fly to the top? Algo change. Stars suddenly missing? Algo change. Positive reviews suddenly 'not recommended' Algo change.
Saw in this case and more if you care to do some legwork.
Oh and the algo is beneficial to paying customers without actually saying so. You can bullshit it anyway you like, "high CPM via our ad network or profile enhancement package means a more reputable business which means those not recommended 4 star reviews are probably true" and off you go. Or support is much more willing to work with you to get rid of 'suspicious' one and two star reviews if you call and the CRM pop-ups you have the 'gold package.'
Note: I have no love for Yelp, but I have have an unquenchable lust for evidence-based claims.
Of course there can be evidence. The changed-algorithm claims merely create a slightly higher bar for the evidence to be convincing. So far, no one seems to have presented evidence that even approaches credible, all we see are unsupported claims. People have sued Yelp for these alleged extortions, and they lose due to lack of evidence to back their claims. Example: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-yelp-ratings-20140905-...
Consider the math: If all businesses with positive ratings on Yelp were paying Yelp for that privilege, Yelp would be the wealthiest company on the planet. By far. Also, if this extortion were true, we'd be hearing about it from thousands of businesses, not one or two here and there.
Consider the Occam: If the public's apparent perception of a business takes a dive, is it more likely that a) one company (Yelp) has been secretly, systematically extorting businesses all over the world for over a decade without being caught red-handed; or b) something happened in the business or the market that had a negative impact on the business?
>Also, if this extortion were true, we'd be hearing about it from thousands of businesses, not one or two here and there.
If I'm a business, should I increase the likelihood that the public gives me bad reviews on yelp when I bring attention to this issue?
>Consider the Occam: [...]
That's a false dilemma. Yelp can push sales quotas upon employees without "knowing" that it's inducing them to post negative (and positive [for those who pay]) reviews. Just because they're not explicitly telling their employees to post negative/positive reviews doesn't mean that they don't do so through other means.
Your either-or is the standard Yelp talking point.
>without being caught red-handed
Because their employees are using Yelp's whistle blowing line.
> If I'm a business, should I increase the likelihood that the public gives me bad reviews on yelp when I bring attention to this issue?
How/why would customers give you more bad reviews if you could prove your business has received fraudulent bad reviews on Yelp? Those dots don't seem to sensibly connect.
> Yelp can push sales quotas upon employees without "knowing" that it's inducing them to post negative (and positive [for those who pay]) reviews. Just because they're not explicitly telling their employees to post negative/positive reviews doesn't mean that they don't do so through other means.
This is a good hypothesis for how it could happen; this is essentially what happened at Wells Fargo. But there's still the pesky lack of evidence for it actually happening at Yelp, where the evidence for it happening at Wells Fargo is considerable--loads of employees and ex-employees discussing it openly, tons of customer records showing accounts opened without permission, etc. That is a key difference that suggests the Yelp accusations are without much merit.
It's a foregone conclusion that some Yelp employees have done manipulative things to customers over the years, and maybe it's those isolated events that spur these occasional complaints, but there's no evidence of a widespread, systemic problem. If such credible evidence materializes, I will change my view, but I'll not apologize for waiting to accept the story until compelling evidence appeared. A tiny percentage of businesses making uncorroborated claims is an absurdly low standard for evidence.
> Because their employees are using Yelp's whistle blowing line.
This is another bare assertion without supporting evidence. If this were the case, where are all of the exposés from former Yelp employees who were pressured to do the extorting?
I probably ought not have engaged in this discussion, because I have no dog in this hunt. I should have remembered that if someone has arrived at a hard conclusion without evidence, then that is a demonstration that evidence is not important to them. I just get so exasperated when I see my peers accepting a stranger's story wholesale without a crumb of evidence. So it goes.
Louis Rossman (the guy who makes mac repair videos) had this happen to him too, and did some investigating of his own/connected the dots between the Yelp salesperson and the person leaving 1 star reviews on his business page.
If you google Eric Sperber, you can see that youtube show up in first page results.
I wonder how in hell is Yelp not giving a fuck? They even tried to take down the video but that guy was smart enough to upload a backup on S3 and many ppl have copies ready to be distributed.
My wife runs a small business and is furious with Yelp. She gets a lot of 5 star reviews, legitimate ones from customers she knows, but Yelp embargoes lots of them and doesn't display them on her Yelp page. She gets frequent cold calls from their sales department, promising that if she signs up for advertising, they can get those 5 star reviews un-embargoed and live on her page.
I became active on Yelp after a new Cafe opened in my town. I loved it so much I just had to go home and write a good review. I did so, and it was embargoed. A user with one 5-star review is usually not taken into account.
After I had written more like 5 or 6 reviews, all my reviews started to count.
Remember how viral those recordings of Comcast shenanigans went? If she keeps getting those calls from Yelp, record one and be the one that finally turns the tide.
Why would those embargoed reviews start to count after she paid Yelp? That is what the Yelp salesperson is implying. Embargoed reviews shouldn't suddenly have more legitimacy due to her buying ads on the site. Something is shady here.
I can imagine the corp spin on this being something like: We embargo reviews until we can validate the reviewer. Paying Yelp can bump the priority of who is validated...
The 'embargo' algorithm is nothing as sensible as you suggest.
If you click through to the hidden reviews, you can quickly see that there is very little logic happening. You'll often see a hidden review from a user who has left 20+ reviews, while at the same time one of the shown reviews is from a first-time reviewer.
I'm surprised that even on HN, people seem to unquestioningly accept that Yelp extorts businesses using reviews, where any other topic would be subject to a higher level of scrutiny. I've heard countless anecdotes about peoples' friend's account of how evil Yelp Sales is, but never any solid proof.
I'm surprised that you're foolish enough to fall under the assumption that people here are somehow smarter or better. They are not. This is simply a web site with zero barrier to entry.
I don't trust Yelp either. There have been too many stories like this over years - and even some in the comments section of this HN story!
I was surprised to see transphobic comments go unremoved. Negative comments criticizing YC backed ventures or saying Peter Thiel is gay is heavily censored through downvotes.
let's not forget that YC companies have an "edge" compared to other submissions.
HN has audience from both sides of the pond. Smart people from both sides write insightful comments. Some people should add a disclaimer to their comments, as it's rather obvious they are related to the company mention in the news.
My friend has a retail business in New York, he had the same experience, he cancelled his advertising contract and immediately most of the positive reviews became hidden and negatives were pouring in and his average rating dropped from 5 to 2 stars in a matter of couple weeks
From a consumer standpoint, I stopped using Yelp when I left a 3-star review (neither good or bad) and it was flagged as "fake". I was so puzzled, i contacted support. They still refused to publish it. I figured the business owner must be an advertiser.
I use TripAdvisor exclusively for restaurant reviews now. Even local ones.
That would seem like the strategy used. Mark all the low ratings as "fake" until the business stops paying. Just do a review again. "ohh these weren't fake" reviews and restore them.
I have a business on Yelp, not a restaurant, I've never paid them. My listing is mostly correct, I've tried to update but the settings never save. Yelp sales call about every three months to sell me on improving my profile. I say I'm not interested and the conversation is done. Have not experienced aggressive sales tactics.
There is something about Yelp that makes people want to give inflammatory reviews.
Once upon a time, I got a fake 1-star review. I knew it was fake because I know who my clients are -- past and present. A few days later, a client who had recently cancelled our contract posted a "real" 1-star review. It was embellished to the point of being a fabrication. Luckily it eventually went away, but it was a bad experience. That fake review from someone who wasn't a client turned into a /real/ review from someone who was!
With this information, I've taken a more critical eye to Yelp reviews and noticed most if not all of the reviews are useless.
They also spam up search listings for "restaurants in my area" with useless results.
This might already exist but how about a history tracker for rating sites. Not sure how it'd deal with terms for scraping information but assuming you maintained history you could see ratings over time. Could also be used to validate claims like this or just overall trends for a business's ratings.
Bonus points for throwing in blockchain based timestamping (because "bitcoin" ;-))
I and my wife left two negative reviews for our realtor on Yelp. The realtor botched the sale of our house in Half Moon Bay, she harassed and lied to us, and we even filed a complaint against her with the San Mateo realtors board.
Because she advertises on Yelp, our reviews were shelved into "not recommended" category. The realtor still has 5 star rating. Never mind that I had submitted more that 30 reviews to Yelp before, so I consider myself a good Yelper.
I went so far as to write a letter to Stoppelman, CEO. No response, no action.
PS The same reviews were published on Zillow no problem.
If I was in the US, had too much time and money on hand it'd do the following: Start serveral business and make sure they never actually serve costumers. Sign them up with yelp. Write a few positive and negative reviews about them. Spend money on yelp advertising on some of them. See how they compared to the control group.
If the rumors are true, sue them with anti-mafia-laws.
The fact that nobody has done this yet colors me very skeptical about the claims.
My small business occaisionally gets calls from them and they are very very rude and high pressure. I remember hanging up on one guy and they kept calling back probably 3-4 times per hour. Even after literally telling the guy to "fuck off". I will never pay for anything on their site or even use it. Foursquare does a much better job at what they do now anyway.
Do we really still trust the internet for reviews on anything at this point? Personally, I've reverted to word of mouth. I assume any review on the internet has been paid for, one way or the other.
i have seen many such accusations in the past but i have never seen any solid proof (screenshot of an email from Yelp or a recorded voice call demanding money). Sure voice recording might be illegal without consent but not all states have that law.
It won't impact Yelp's pagerank, it will only impact your business site's pagerank (likely in a negative way). In essence you're saying "don't use Yelp to evaluate my site's reputation." Which would likely de-rank you and could result in Yelp appearing before the official site of your business.
This is such garbage. Yelp might be the worst company on the planet, but "anonymous internet poster who has a friend who worked there two months and claims something unspecified-but-fishy is going on" is completely worthless.
"A friend of mine said he'd be threatened with legal action if he revealed what HappyTypist does on Saturday nights."
I worked there for years. Your "friend" is wrong. The way they make money is rather transparently described in their quarterly filings with the SEC. Since they're a public company.
Actually, I'm not sure what your "friend" is accusing them of doing, so it's a hard claim to rebut. It's embarrassing that a vague hearsay accusation (of...what, exactly?) is considered worthy of attention here.
To be blunt, they're total bullshit. Which is why you never see any evidence, outside of vague hearsay from someone's uncle.
Yelp has a small army of people cold-calling every business in the country to sell ads. Simultaneously and independently, they have a system that filters out bad reviews, all day, every day. Just by chance, someone is going to get called soon after reviews have been filtered. This leads, inevitably, to third-hand stories of someone's Uncle Walter who got called right before/after some reviews were removed.
It could be a small part of those people who are doing this in order to have a bigger bonus. Bad incentive structures that cause bad behaviours is not an unknown phenomenon.
I don't doubt that in an organization of thousands of salespeople, some say bad things. But they don't have the ability to act on their threats. That's the point. Salespeople have no ability to influence reviews.
Also, again...nobody offers evidence of these conversations. It's all hearsay. Lots of accusations, but not so much as a link to a profile page to back them up.
Can you comment on the link in the OP? I thought at this point it's almost assumed yelp removes negative reviews from advertising customers and posts fake negative reviews when customers have cancelled. There's plenty of similar experiences just in these comments.
There are many, many stories of bad (and incriminating) behavior on behalf of Yelp salespeople over the phone, but I have never heard a recording. Even though most claims indicate that the harassing calls are repeated many times. Somebody record one of these calls and become Internet famous!
There are also many stories like this one that should come with before/after screenshots or links to an archived page. They need to actually link to the page in question so we can see if they are accurately depicting the situation. Shill reviews are easily spotted by people who have the necessary experience.
Like I said, I am ready to turn around on Yelp, these stories sound very plausible to me. I haven't yet seen sufficient evidence. The fact is that I do use that service and the subset of restaurants that I know very well have reviews that match my experience with the place. Therefore I can't help but think that perhaps the person who write the linked article is perhaps deserving of bad reviews and doesn't want to admit it.