A website that we have noticed that is particularly problematic is Yelp. Currently there is a class action suit against them for unfair business practice and extortion, and there are plenty of articles online right now about this (see: Small Businesses Join Lawsuit Against Yelp). We witnessed this first hand when one of our first clients contact us about a yelp review that showed up in search engine results when you typed her name into Google. The Yelp review came up number one and was even before her personal website! She said that ever since the review showed up, it had basically ruined her business since she received a large amount of business through the internet. And the truth is, even if she didn’t receive most of her business online, most people “Google” a company before doing business with them today. She attempted to contact Yelp several times about the review but they refused to remove it.
We investigated further and were shocked to find that Yelp was actually promoting her bad review. The method seemed particularly unfair compared to other review sites like Amazon.com which give all sorts of options for not only rating products, but for rating reviews as “helpful” or “unhelpful.” They seemed to have more of an equal opportunity when it came to rankings. But on Yelp, next to our client’s bad review, there were three options available, “funny,” “cool” and “helpful.” Needless to say, our client did not find any of these appropriate. Furthermore there were three other reviews that other customers of hers had provided and Yelp had hid them at a small link at the bottom of the page under “filtered results!”
We investigated more, and soon enough we found lots of business owners who were in the same position as our client. This was the event that spurred the creation of The Review Buster into a full fledged online reputation management service company. Our firm has managed to recruit the best engineers from the top internet consulting companies who have over 10 years worth of SEO experience. We wanted to expand our operation to not just promoting people’s products and businesses, but also to help individuals and businesses alike clear their online reputation and rid themselves of bad online reviews. And so TheReviewBuster.com was born.
I’m going through this now with Yelp. Its fishy. I’d like to sue as well.
I would like to join the suit, I have contacted yelp, where my personal name was mentioned in a fabricated story, and asked them to investigate on the third request to take “at least my name off”, this will hurt me with future employers, and the business I currently run. The guy who wrote the review only writes bad reviews, and is a known crack pot.
What’s a girl to do?
Sorry I would like to sue YELP… Yelp is a biased well aligned extortionist, no one should have that much power. Five positive reviews from legitimate customers were removed, and the one requested remains in top spot.
YELP is a farce.
I have had the same experience. One angry client, from over four years ago, keeps posting horrible reviews as if her complaints arose yesterday. I contacted Yelp and was advised to ask clients to post positive reviews. So, I did, and they gladly did. They were immediately “filtered” and made invisible, leaving the one, mostly false and extremely damaging review. When I asked Yelp why. I received a written response stating that positive reviews from new reviewers were less reliable than negative ones and that its “automated system” is designed to favor the negative ones. I would like to know what planet Yelp lives on. Yelp has destroyed my business, and now that Google reposts Yelp’s one extremely negative review, but none of the positive ones that were filtered by Yelp, Google has joined in the destruction in a very irresponsible manner. In my experience, Yelp is nothing more than a modern day extortionist and blackmailer, but with much more power to destroy a lifetime of hard work with a single paragraph, while deliberately ignoring anything positive. Google is just joining in with that crowd. What happened to fair and balanced? The Internet was supposed to improve information, not eliminate it to favor a few big companies.
The same thing happened to me, only the bad reviews show, all the good ones are filtered. This looks terrible for my business.
I have a few business locations, and always when we get a review by our customers it doesn’t get published. I have had some negative competition gave same review to all my business locations. Those kind of reviews always shows up. Therefore I would like to join the team against Yelp.
Yelp has a filtering algorithm which they describe as “advanced..” but it seems to filter out lots of good reviews and leave the bad ones.
I wish to join the band wagon. Yelp has taken things too far and hurting so many small business. Yes, people have a right to speak their mind…But Yelp is orchestrating the whole site to their advantage by filtering. The filtering is the real issue.
I too would like to sue Yelp. If I want to provide crappy business to my customers at their expense, that’s my business and mine alone.
Hello,
I suppose you could contact a lawyer to sue Yelp. We’re not a lawfirm.
I owned a private gym in South Beach and I hired Yelp. BIG MISTAKE. They removed positive reviews written about my business and left one fabricated review that was slanderous to me personally. They ruined a big piece of my business. I definitely want to be part of the class action suit–how do I get involved?
In Jan 2010, venture capital firm Elevation Partners invested $25 million into Yelp. They need to know how their investment is being spent and that it will reflect on them as well. Perhaps, write them a letter advising them of Yelp’s questionable tactics. That would be a good start.
I have been in business over 7 years and until recently have lost business. I had a 13 year old customer write a horrible 1 star review on my business which has turned my 5 star business into a 1 star business. I used to have 5 star reviews posted all over my yelp business page until I was contacted by a yelp employee saying they saw my review and would guarantee only 5 star reviews back if I paid the “low fee of $250″ a month! I thought this was insane so I declined. Sure enough the next week any remotely positive reviews where immediately taken off. I contacted yelp and their only answer was nothing at all. Now weeks gone by my business has been losing business and on top of that anytime I post something in the “blog” 10 or so other people with like 150 reviews say things like “your flagged” “your just trying to get money” etc. It is really sad and unfortunate that this is how they chose to conduct business. It makes me sick, I can’t sleep at night and I just don’t know what to do anymore.
We had the same thing happening to us. We first contacted them, asking them to do something about their filter because all of our recent reviews were filtered out. Only the bad reviews were left standing. We even fell for the advertising route because we were promised better results. Well the phones were not ringing. We actually had some of our customers calling us back, complaining that they were disappointed about yelp. They said they spent the time writing us a review only to find out that it got filtered out the next day.
We went from 4.5 Stars and 30 + reviews (with some filtered reviews) to 3 stars 12 reviews and 60+ filtered reviews. We canceled the advertising with them, however have not heard back from them either. Really bad customer service on top of everything.
I would not mind suing them. I think that is what they need. I don’t mind, if they have a filter. Have a filter that takes out the old reviews, but don’t take out the recent ones. There are better ways to find out if reviews are legit or not.
If anyone is interested in getting together for another class action suit, please email me. Even if you read the reviews about Yelp on their own site, I am amazed that not more people are trying to go that way right now.
We lost a lot of business because of that and I think it is time for payback!
ANNOUNCEMENT:
We have recently implemented a system to outsmart yelp from hiding our filtered reviews:
Step 1- first of all, if you’re advertising with yelp, stop doing so and shift that money to optimize your own web site instead
Step 2- have a graphic designer make a yelp badge that is placed on your web site. It should say “we have …… filtered and unfiltered reviews on yelp”.
Step 3- when a visitor clicks on the badge, it will go to another page ON YOUR OWN WEB SITE (instead of going to yelp’s. (why help them get traffic and rank higher anyways)?
Step 4- on this page have your graphic designer get a screen capture (picture) of all your filtered and unfiltered reviews and have them pasted together onto one page.
Now, all your reviews (filtered or not) will be visible to all your web site visitors.
5- put a note on the top that says, “for your convenience we have placed all our filtered and unfiltered reviews on one page to see. If you’d like to go to our live yelp page, click here …………”
Make the whole page clickable to your live yelp page so no-one will say you’re trying hide something or to be dishonest
Advantages of doing this:
1- your visitors will stay on your web site instead of being directed to yelp’s
2- your visitor can’t click on your competitors
3- no more being a slave to yelp’s algorithm
4- yelp would not benefit from getting traffic from you and higher rankings on google
5- this whole process cost us less than $150 to implement
Just be sure to shift that $300 per month on yelp advertising and put it into KEYWORDS that people will search for.
Please pass this along !
Julia you can offset negative content found on your Google results by hosting positive content from your customers
You can even upload real letters of recommendation that you may have received over the years in pdf or image form. This site is pretty cool and has worked for us.
Negative reviews can obviously have a huge impact on your small business when they show up in your google search results. It can often take lots of time, effort, and money to get a negative complaint to go away. However, one way you can fight this is to get more positive reviews circulating around the web. You should check out this webstie. It lets you approve any reviews and complimets before they go live on the web, guaranteeing that they will be positive! Our compliment page on this site has already started showing up in our google search results after a short time!
To Yelp
From Burbank Kawasaki Inc.
Extortion Fraud
Yelp has been removing Burbank Kawasaki Inc. and American business positive reviews from respectful citizen in their community and all over America. Yelp has been thriving on the negative reviews to extort American business owners to pay Yelp to get good reviews.
If Yelp does not remove all the negative reviews and restore all the positive, Burbank Kawasaki Inc has no choice. and all of the business owners victims, to file a law suit. Yelp is the worst type of terrorist destroying America’s freedom and free enterprise. Yelp is attacking American citizens and forcing American business to lay off workers because of your “Mafia” tactics. Restore the truth or face the consequences like Obama to Bin Laden.
Burbank Kawasaki
1329 Hollywood Way
Burbank,CA 91505
818-848-6627
I am right there with the rest of you on Yelp!! Include me in your lawsuit…. 15 years in business and I get one person who is out of sorts and now they don’t only have me on Yelp but have posted on the web when my company name comes up.. Who are these shmucks.. We need freedom of speech but slander is one thing and trying to ruin ones reputation and business is another.. How can we fight this.. Please respond…
I’m with you as well. Please contact us for a lawsuit with Yelp. They keep filtering all the GOOD Reviews. We send our own quality survey’s and there is a huge discrepancy between yelps rating and our anonymous survey. We are in!
Yelp took several of our clients good review and left bogus competitors reviews!!! So much for their advanced “filtering”. We should have a right to protect our businesses and our personal reputations. There should be mechanism allowed to verify information!!! We do not ask them to promote us so why do they feel they have a right to put us down! We worked hard for our reputation!
HMS Plumbing is a small, family owned business in Manassas, Virginia. Yelp has filtered out EVERY single one of our five star reviews as of this morning. My daughter and I have spoken with and corresponded with Daira Scanello (daira@yelp.com) for quite some time. Yesterday, I emailed her and asked her to forward my email to higher ups for help. I offered names, contact info, copies of invoices, etc. to prove that our five star reviews are 100% legit. No response except to discover this morning that we now have 1 star with Yelp. And, yes, of course, I responded to the three bad reviews (out of 17) and it’s pretty clear they are the rantings of very dishonest people.
I really don’t know what to do at this point. I am wandering around on the internet trying to find some kind of recourse for a small business that is unfairly maligned.
BTW, there’s no point to asking a customer to review us on Yelp since it would be filtered anyway, no matter how many other reviews they have. Just check out my filtered reviews if you doubt that…
Please let me know if any lawsuits are going be filed. I am even going to pay for the attorneys. Yelp is the biggest extortion ever. They have hurt my business tones and they have even accused my credible business of carrying fake merchandise. Please let me know, thanks.
Christen
After unsuccessfully trying to get an ex-girlfriend posting off of my business yelp page (Which I never authorize to be put up) I finally took things into my own hands. If I hate yelp so much than I thought why not hit them were it counts, in the “Pocket Book” ! That’s right I am going strait at them and I will make a dent in their pocket book to a point where they WILL listen to me. I started a competitive site called “BLURBITNOW” this is an HONEST site where there are NO hidden reviews. everything is out in the open, If you are REALLY sick of YELP, then Help me spread the news about BLURBITNOW.com together we can hurt Yelp where it counts….In the WALLET.
Yelp help promoting hatred, personal attack reviews. I also see discrimination reviews. I strongly urge to boycott yelp. I have similar issue. Few months ago, I subscribe to yelp using a business email. I received an email from yelp informed me that my yelp account is deleted. Soon after that I see bad review about my business on yelp. I did not find out until a friend told me about it. He had similar issue before and took many years to get out of it. I want to join the law suit to sue yelp. Please help needhelpnow9999@gmail.com
Yelp has pushed me to ruin.
You might think this exaggerated?
I don’t think so. Here is why.
I am a small business, a contractor, with a good reputation and a happy clientele. I worked and work hard for it. I started out a few years ago and survived the worst economic crisis.
Then I started a yelp account.
I asked my clients to write me a review on Yelp. Some had written a conventional letter of review/reference. The latter I OCR scanned and emailed back to my client with the wish if they would be so kind, review their writing and post it on Yelp.
They all did.
Shortly thereafter things went downhill. Yelp rapidly started to hide my reviews until ALL MY 8 REVIEWS where hidden. GONE out of sight, only to be found by a vague light gray link at the bottom. I even updated my website and Yelp profile to point this out to a prospective viewer. Check it out for yourself and go to eucraft dot com.
Some of my clients called asking where their review about my services was. I had to tell my clients that their review is for unknown reasons and uncontrollable by me, hidden and they shall look for that light gray link at the bottom.
However, that helps little. Doing a search, e.g. Google for a contractor Yelp reviews pop up from all but I’m nowhere to be found.
I contacted Yelp several times regarding this matter but all I received was a “boiler plate” answer if any, explaining and justifying all their actions, rather than an honest answer to my question.
I offered Yelp to see for themselves that all are legit existing real people I have done work for and that I have all possible hard proof for all; contracts, permits, receipts, invoices etc. Even scans of letter written to me. No reply from Yelp but trying to force me to buy advertising.
I consider this a gross, unfair and bad faith fraudulent interference into my business under the pretends of helping a business by means of reviews.
If there is a way and I find a method to sabotage Yelp’s business I will. Since this is what they are doing to me and I have no realistic legal recourse or funding for suing them.
By now I have lost so much business that I probably have to close shop and look for emplyment; courtesy Yelp. In some cases I learned later “they had found nothing on Yelp” about me. True, even my business name does not show in search results when you enter it in Yelp. Try it. However, if you should find me, there are no review indications. Try it!
What a bunch of hideous fraudulent crap baloney Yelp is! Crooks.
And nothing can be done about it?
I’d like to file a suit as well. My family’s company just took over ownership of a restaurant and it’s obvious that our competitor is leaving false reviews on our YELP and the good ones that real customer have made are being filtered. They are purposely guiding my family’s restaurant and livelihood to it’s demise! PLEASE, I’d like more information about suing.
Yes, this is another problem; often it is the business’s competitors leaving bad reviews. There is no way to know on a site like this!
TripAdvisor used to be the same but they now make the reviewer prove that they had a valid stay at a motel, etc.
I LOVE YELP! This sounds to me like a bunch of business owners who can’t deal with truth from customers. Every time I post a bad review about a Restauraunt I’ve been to, I’ve noticed theres others who had the same bad Experince.
Maybe you guys should learn from the bad reviews….unless your ego is out of control!?!?
Yelp has saved me visits to s–t holes.
I can tell you that I am not a business owner, I also love Yelp, but I can see where internet review sites like this are very unfair and can be very damaging to a business. Unless they get all or almost all bad reviews, I take them with a grain of salt; it’s very easy to go on the internet as a faceless unknown and write anything you want, things you wouldn’t say face to face.
Another thing is that I know what customer service is like in this day and age; people can be very rude and demanding and that waitress/hostess/customer service rep is a humain being too. They may generally be very nice and accommodating, but you need to consider that these days many of us are overworked, underpaid and we also work when we’re sick, tired, having a bad day. You don’t know what is going on in that person’s life at the time, so unless they are consistently unfriendly or seem rude on a consistent basis, it’s very unfair to go on a review site and trash them.
Gene, It is well documented that Yelp allows false accusations of slander and outright lies to be posted by its “elite” reviewers, who in some cases haven’t even patronized the business they’re reviewing, then solicits the businesses into paying to have the negativity buried. Do a little research before blindly defending some corporation that doesn’t give a hang about you.
I haven’t seen many reviews for the business I work for on Yelp, but I am a member and I have seen some very damaging reviews for other good businesses in the area. One thing that isn’t at all fair is that the reviewer does not even have to prove that they were even a customer and the business has its side of the story as well; I know this from customer service. Generally it’s a problem customer that goes on sites like Yelp out of retaliation (we get threats from people like this).
I even contacted them, as a Yelp member, and suggested they have stricter guidelines for reviews, one of those being no personal insults (race, looks weight, even names of employees/owners) and that the reviewer should have to prove they are a valid customer of that establishment. I got some reply about freedom of speech. Quite honestly, any reviewer who starts getting personal in their criticisms lose me anyway and I don’t even read the rest of their review.
On the other hand, you have owners/employees writing rave reviews about themselves.
As much as I like reading Yelp to find good restaurants (I can ignore the bad reviews personally, unless that’s all they get) I don’t think their site is fair to the businesses.
Yelp sucks period. I had a bad review posted online for a whole year on yelp and thankfully the customer let me come out to try and redeem my company for the bad job a technician did. So I went out there, did the job again for free, made my client very happy and she changed her review to 5 stars and said she was a customer for life. A whole year went by before I realized she went to yelp and left that review so It was on there for a year. 1 STAR rating for a year. And the day she made it 5 STARS yelp filtered her updated review. Isn,t that some crap??????????????? I would love to sue them