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Yelp starts branding companies for buying fake reviews
Employees of the online review site Yelp at the East Coast headquarters of the tech company in New York City. The popular review site will now post online alerts outing businesses suspected of soliciting paid recommendations.
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Social media sites have made it easy to get recommendations for everything from restaurants to doctors and dog walkers. But as the old saying goes, "If a thing seems to good to be true...?"
These days, your friend might be getting a kick back for posting that cute raincoat on Facebook. And that trendy-looking, new hair salon might be paying people to write fake reviews. Yelp is taking a bold step today to “out” businesses that are paying for reviews. If it catches a business doing it, they’re going to post an alert on their site that reads, “We caught someone red-handed trying to buy reviews for this business.”
Weeding out “fake” or “purchased” reviews isn’t new to Yelp. The site has an algorithm that monitors its 30 million reviews regularly. It sweeps out shady reviews and highlights trustworthy ones, said Vince Solitto the head of public affairs at Yelp. “And as a result, we display about 80 percent of the reviews that are submitted to our site to protect consumers from fake and shilled review content,” Soilitto said.
That means 20 percent of the reviews submitted to Yelp aren’t posted because, for the most part, they are fake or paid for. But recently Yelp’s team of crack investigators took its sleuthing into real world.
“We noticed some advertisements on Craigslist and elsewhere where business owners were offering to pay money in exchange for people to write the positive reviews,” Sollitto said.
So Yelp employees posed as “elite” reviewers and answered the job listings. “Elite reviewer” status is awarded to people who’ve done lots of reviews. “And we saw that some business owners were willing to pay large sums of money especially for reviews written by elite folks,” Sollito said.
How much? Anywhere between $5 and $200. Yelp caught about a dozen companies in the sting, including a moving company and a jewelry store.
“I think it’s going to work,” said Bing Lui, a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois in Chicago who researches fake reviews. “It makes the store very, very careful.”
"tobyishere"hit the nail on the head with the story from Yelp-Sucks. While there are business owners trying to purchase reviews, there are also Yelpers trying to get free services and food from businesses. We have heard over and over from clients who keep a log of their customers and insist they have never serviced some of the people who have left a review ... the reason being is its quicker and cheaper to leave the review first, and then try and extort the business than actually use the service in the first place.
While buying reviews is not a good idea, there are strategy/methods that have significantly helped improve our clients ratings and position on Yelp. We often blog http://esioh.com/blog/ about our Yelp encounters and suggestions as its quite the hot topic these days.
Business owners: Don't forget about the other review sites. Though Yelp has the biggest cut of the online review market, there are other players like Google, Citysearch, Yahoo Local, UrbanSpoon, SuperPages etc etc et ... Make sure you're taking advantage of them.
This story is borrowed from yelp-sucks.com
Extorted by a Yelper; The Yelp extortion scheme
I’m not writing this article to help those who wish to cheat business owner. But to expose a scheme which some Yelpers have used to victimize my small business. I and many other small business owners have been suffering for years under Yelp’s irresponsible regime. We’ve been extorted by both Yelp and Yelpers alike.
Here’s how the scheme works. The Yelper uses your services, the business may be a home cleaning service, a plumber, doctor, mover, a dry cleaner etc…. The Yelper won’t complain to you directly, they know they’ll look foolish because they don’t have a good argument. Instead the coward will bash you on Yelp usually including statements such as “Don’t Go,” “Terrible,” “AVOID!,” “Horrible,” etc…. Worst of all the review stays up indefinitely. Four years from now it’ll still reek havoc on the bottom line.
Businesses that ignore these comments will soon learn the power of Yelp. Customers will come in very timid, saying “someone wrote something bad on Yelp.” But what’s worst is you’ll never know how many clients you lose. Business will start to drop. Yelp has terrific SEO. Most likely they outrank the business’s web site for just about every keyword. Sometimes even outranking the business’s own name.
Publicly responding to the Yelper via Yelp does not work. It won’t be prominently displayed. Potential clients can only see your first sentence under the Yelper’s review (they usually won’t bother.) They have to click “more” to read the rest. Most clients won’t waste the time. Most won’t even open your Yelp page if you have less than four stars. Would you want to use a service that only has one star on Yelp?
The business owner who has already experienced the power of Yelp already knows the drill. Either contact the Yelper via e-mail or via Yelp and give a refund, offer additional free services etc…. Whatever it takes, otherwise risk losing dozens of additional clients and thousands of dollars monthly. After the greedy Yelper is satisfied he deletes the review. Yelp encourages this, they tell you to contact the client to resolve the situation. This is a very one sided fight, in which the business owner cannot win. Still trust Yelp’s reviews?
Please do more research into Yelp. They have such a misguided policy, and I wish more people knew them for what they are.
As a small business owner, I hate Yelp. I naively created a page for my business when I was just starting out, and I wish I'd done more proper research first. Yelp's "algorithm" is nothing but a diluted way for them to remain in control of reviews and exhort advertising money from businesses.
I have received six five-star reviews on my business, and they've ALL been filtered. Meaning, none of them are visible to anyone but me. Yes, Yelp likes you to think that they're visible. If I am logged into my account, I see the reviews. If one of my commenters is logged into their account, they see their review. But if you're not logged in? It's not there. You have to scroll to the bottom of the page, find a tiny link, click it, then enter a CAPCHA.
After doing research, I am by far not the only business this has happened to. Many, many businesses have their positive reviews filtered--reviews that are completely legitimate. And when these businesses contacted Yelp about it, they either didn't receive responses, were politely urged to advertise with Yelp, or unhelpfully told to practice good customer service.
And to close your business profile with Yelp? There is no "one click" option. You must send them an email formally requesting that your profile be closed.
Yelp is such a sham. Sure, "investigating" who is paying for positive reviews seems legitimate. I probably wouldn't shop at a place who received that Scarlet Letter on their profile. But more importantly, why are they doing so? Are they doing it because their legitimate positive reviews have been filtered? They need "elite reviewers" to review their businesses because elite reviewers reviews don't get filtered. Yelp is simply trying to control, control, control.
