Yelp ticks off merchants by pulling their listings
In yet another example of the Internet’s increasing influence, several merchants are ticked off at Yelp for removing their listings. Yelp is accusing some members of swapping good reviews with others to inflate first impressions by site visitors.
It all happened several days ago, when Yelp decided to purge a set number of accounts it found guilty of creating shady or unauthentic reviews. Business owners who looked to be swapping positive reviews were especially targeted. Yelp also regularly deletes comments it thinks are fake.
Obviously owners of the deleted accounts are upset because all of their effort toward marketing their brand online is now wasted. “The move sparked an outcry among local businesses, and has even led some entrepreneurs to band together with thoughts of a class-action lawsuit. Their reasoning is, if they legitimately spend their money and patronize a service, why can’t they review it?” according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Generally there seems to be a shift as people look to find information about a location online before actually visiting. Yelp has a large audience with over 11 million people visiting every month and over 3 million reviews available on the site.
Yelp replied to the criticism by saying “when we see local businesses trying to exchange reviews, quid pro quo, it violates the spirit of Yelp,” he said. “When a reader comes to Yelp looking to patronize a business and spend their hard-earned money, the reviews should be from customers who have found that business on their own volition.”
It’s a contentious issue as Yelp seeks to build trust with its visitors by strictly enforcing authentic reviews. At the same time, business owners should be able to express their opinions of other establishments. Maybe some sort of acknowledgement that the reviewer owns a local business would address the situation? Except not everyone would volunteer that information.
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July 8th, 2008
Yelp’s biased model sucks. Bunch of tweens banding together looking to attain an elite status. Please, let them yelp my business, ill come after em with a meat cleaver. Punks
September 15th, 2008
Below’s a thread about someone giving a company a bad review, and then a Yelp employee going out of their way to contact and eventually harass the reviewer. When the reviewer blocks the employee’s communications to avoid further harassment, the employee then opens a public thread, and divulges private emails.
The employee at first vehemently denies being paid by Yelp, but later gets caught confessing to the whole thing: ”yelps pays me a lot of money to protect its sponsors. its a good racket. dont blow it for me.” The fact that this same employee who began the harassment has also given the other company a glowing review, is completely unethical to say the least.
See for yourself, and quickly, before Yelp pulls the thread down to cover up their tracks:
http://www.yelp.com/topic/san-francisco-calling-you-out-atlas-plumbing-review
July 14th, 2009
I don’t particularly care for Yelp myself. I’ve also read some of the negative things about yelp supposedly trying to extort money from businesses in exchange for highlighting positive reviews, etc. I think it’s a better idea to avoid them and stick with established sites like citysearch, and I’ve noticed a lot of new review sites cropping up like fairplayreviews.com