Don't like your online reviews? Sue!
March 19th, 2010 • Posted by Bill Bice • Permalink
Yelp isn't here to help businesses. Their focus is on consumers, and they believe if consumers trust them, businesses will be forced to work with them. And they're right.
Where you really see this is in Yelp's aggressive approach to culling their reviews, removing any that they believe have a good chance of being biased. They don't want business owners reviewing themselves, for instance, or a business giving out discounts in exchange for good reviews. On the other hand, an angry ex-employee that signs up for a Yelp account just to write nasty things about you is likely to be culled, too.
This approach has helped Yelp gain an impressive consumer audience, and now Yelp is getting more and more aggressive in selling advertising to businesses.
At some point, just based on the odds, these two things are going to cross over by coincidence: a business will decide not to advertise with Yelp, and shortly thereafter, see reviews disappear. If those happen to be positive reviews that Yelp's algorithm has now decided aren't so trustworthy, you've suddenly got a very unhappy business owner. And the result?
Three civil suits have been filed against the San Francisco start-up in the last month, accusing the company of extorting businesses to advertise. For example, Boris Levitt, the owner of a San Francisco furniture-restoration company, alleges in a complaint in California Superior Court that Yelp retaliates against businesses that don't choose to advertise by negatively skewing their ratings and reviews on the site. — Wall Street Journal
What has your experience with Yelp been? Yelp is becoming increasingly important to spas, so we're going to spend some more time talking about how you can best use Yelp to your advantage to drive business to your spa.
• Trackback • Posted in Spa Marketing
We have had a few bad reviews in which we attempted to contact the client to try to make things right and found out they had no real intention of writing a good review. I have had clients who have written favorable reviews and were removed a few days later. The clients are older and not computer savvy, so they are not doing a lot of things online. But they were told about our coupons online, so they signed up on Yelp (not that they needed to but they did). I guess since they are not avid Yelp users they removed the reviews. Needless to say, I am not happy with Yelp and their business model.
I am so glad these business owners have decided to file suit. I am not surprised at all, what they are saying is completely true.Yelp is terrible, terrible, terrible, I have had the same experience as these business owners, there business ethics and moral are very bad. I wish I could not be listed at all on Yelp.
We do a lot of online advertising and tried Yelp sponsorships for a few months as an alternative to Citysearch. THE DAY AFTER I TERMINATED THE CONTRACT (because there was 0% increase of web traffic) about a dozen of my 5 star (all legitimate) reviews came down — bringing my overall star rating to 4.
I contacted the rep about it immediately, and they just said, "It's our proprietary algorithm." Sure it is. Yelp's ethics are highly questionable and they deserve to have to defend their practices in court.
Unfortunately, we are forced to deal with them so I hope this public scrutiny forces Yelp to clean up their act.
Yelp has been a nightmare for our business. We all know that the one bad customer out of thousands of good will be the one to use Yelp. Customers now use Yelp as a way to get discounts or refunds — saying, "If you don't do it my way, I'll bad Yelp you."
We have great reviews on our site because we push our great clients to review us. It takes away from my time to run my business. Always counteracting a possible bad review on Yelp. They have been calling me non-stop for about a year to advertise and I've seen bad reviews go to the top and our most recent good review find their way to the bottom. It's VERY frustrating.
We were asked to advertise and do a comp party for the Elite Squad. When we stated that we do not pay for our reviews, we were smeared on Yelp by the Elite Squad which, by the way, supersedes all other reviews and stays prominent on the spa's Yelp page. Good luck with this one, it is pretty obvious what's up. When you have power, better use it for a while… hehe.
We've held out on advertising with them for many of the same reasons folks have already discussed here. We also don't see the value of paying them money for the "impressions" and "features" they give you. Our favorite Yelp feature is when you pay them, they take the advertising of direct competitors off of "your" page. We still find that amusing and refer to it as the "Yelp Extortion Business Model."
We are here in the Bay Area next to them and the whole valley knows that they hire college students to do aggressive advertising sales to businesses and are trained like robots to push push push. We've also have EXTENSIVE experience with how ratings disappear due to their "algorithm." We've given up at this point as you can't reason with them and they hide behind excuses and promises, so we just ignore them, but we're sure our disappearing good reviews and always-visible bad ones are hurting our business. Sigh…
Great company…
I have thought about suing more than once. Citysearch and Yelp force you to advertise to get a better online presence. They have no problem taking your money, but if a crazy client or a disgruntled employee decide to smear you, they could care less. I have quit advertising with both of them. Why pay to have bad press pushed to the top of your reviews. We all know some clients can not be made happy. I myself have contacted negative review people to try to fix or refund the service in an effort to do the right thing. They have no interest, they just want to rant and rave or they ignore you completely and your offer to make it right. We had a client that we booked incorrectly, our fault; we comped her services and her friends, apologized profusely and when they left they seemed very happy. Why not, the complete spa day had been free? They then went home and wrote a terrible review about their appointments being misbooked. Never mentioned the free services, our apology or anything. You just can not win. These review sites are just a forum for unhappy people to slander you. Many times what is said is not even true or completely misrepresented. I think they should be held accountable for making it even harder to keep a small business running.
We have had similar problems with Yelp and Citysearch. We realized that when we were not ready to upgrade services all of our positive reviews disappeared and an influx of negative reviews began to pop up. We were inundated with hassling sales calls, and negative reviews. We researched our schedule to find these clients with negative experiences and realized that these comments were posted by people that could never have been here. We have canceled our business with both sites and unfortunately, they still keep only negative reviews concerning our spa. We are at a loss on how to remove our business name from their site, if any one has information on how to do this please advise.
I have had the same experience. I've seen several positive reviews go up on Yelp, only to be gone days later. Yet the same negative one written by a disgruntled ex-employee remains. So, too, do the multiple outstanding reviews of a competitor, who advertises with them, OF COURSE. It's not just Yelp, but all of the review sites that are becoming problematic because of abuse by the consumer — we often hear (paraphrasing) that if we don't do it the clients way, give them discounts, comps, etc. that they are going to write bad reviews about us online. I recently had to ban an ex-client from coming to the spa because she was so abusive and derogatory to my staff, calling them names and cursing at them, and she went on Google maps and left a horrible review, insinuating that we have security cameras in the treatment rooms (because we have them in the lobby) and film our clients undressed, as well as all sorts of other slanderous things. She is an attorney, so she worded it such a way that it was only suggested, not outright slander. I've written to Google several times, to no avail. It's tough when someone can damage a small business in such a tremendous way, simply because of a personal vendetta. What's to stop an ex-girlfriend or friend or a competitor to write reviews like this, to their own advantage? Something needs to be done about this — it's simply not fair to the small business owner who puts their blood, sweat & tears into doing things the right way, only to be mowed down like someone like this.
Yes I call them extortion reviews. Imagine being a lawyer. We cannot reveal confidential information and that is basically everything about a client. So the client can trash your firm, and you cannot respond with the evidence that client is a former convicted felon, that he or she lied to the police, is a nut job, etc. We are left with Google saying, "Oh well."