yelp

• Yelp, the massively popular, ‘cult’ driven community built around local business reviews and recommendations has hit another bump in the negative PR road. Yelp was first criticized after their launch after it was discovered their own employees were writing fake reviews to fill the site without ever attending the business. Since then, there has been criticism and even lawsuits over negative consumer reviews on Yelp significantly hurting small business owners.
• If you thought that was bad, get ready for this. The East Bay Express outed the San Francisco based company today for soliciting local businesses to pay a fee to remove bad reviews from their Yelp page. The going price is $299 a month to keep anything but positive reviews off your page. The sales pitch goes as follows:

“Hi, this is Mike from Yelp,” the voice would say. “You’ve had three hundred visitors to your site this month. You’ve had a really good response. But you have a few bad ones at the top. I could do something about those.”

• Small business owners have been complaining that they have been receiving calls from a notorious 415 area code number that has a Yelp representative on the other line. The report says that right around the time of the month when calls come in, the negative reviews seem to be more present on their page. Many think Yelp is purposely putting bad reviews on business owner’s pages before they solicit them to make their sales pitch that much stronger. According to the small business owners, the salesman starts off the pitch by trying to sell a sponsored listing on the site, a feature that will feature your restaurant or business listing in search results or on similar competitor’s pages. This is what the $299 is for, and alternatively it rids your bad reviews. Some owners claimed that once they denied Yelp for advertising help, they were subsequently hit with more mysterious negative reviews.
• I’m still hoping that this is some rogue employee who has the ability to delete bad reviews and is trying to become a top salesman, but until Yelp comes clean, I am off to CitySearch (sounds so boring, I know).

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