YELP; Strong arms restaurants

I think the public needs to know how Yelp.com operates.

They will selectively filter the reviews of each business.

Have you ever noticed that the reviews are not linear by date? The first one might be recent. Then one from last year, then below that another recent one maybe?
Do you know why they do this? Because they blackmail the business. They approach the business and say that they can "help" filter the bad reviews, and put the good ones in prominent postion. If the business does not pay for the advertising/blackmail, then the bad reviews continue to be posted higher than the good ones.
Just wanted to past that along. There will eventually be a lawsuit over this practice.

 

Oh, I noticed. I was checking into the spa at the Suncoast because the prices are frickin' unbelievable. They had a single one star review on Yelp. I was a little dismayed but then I notice that there are a bunch of filtered reviews. All the filtered reviews are positively glowing. If I didn't take the effort to dig deeper, I would have had the complete wrong impression. I have fooled around on Yelp before but at this point, I don't know why anyone takes them seriously.

 

I am guessing its something like:

a) you own a restaurant and its getting bad reviews and you don't know how to get rid of them

b) your favorite restaurant has some reviews you don't agree with and no matter how many good reviews you write you can't get bury the bad ones

c) you wrote a review for a restaurant and it didn't appear at the top


Yelp makes its money through advertising, integrating with third party partners and special added features offered to their business signups... not through shaking down a handful of restaurants for a few nickles and dimes at a time.

The review process is similar to what Facebook did last year: they do post new reviews for a restaurant but they also intersperse it with what are effectively "popular" reviews, IE: reviews that are from elite posters, have been shared through other social media channels, or have been rated by others.

You might think "Well I only want to see new reviews!" but then that would actually make Yelp pretty useless as the good and useful reviews, or reviews by people who do a lot of reviewing and so have garnered some Yelp respect, could easily be buried.

An example of what I mean would be:
You see a restaurant and have never eaten there. You want to know if the food and service is any good so you call up reviews on Yelp.

Now lets say the food at this place is really bad, either too salty or maybe its too bland, and the service is really bad... and lets say that the owner of this place has a lot of accounts on Yelp that he uses to write good reviews daily for his restaurant.

Now if Yelp only showed new reviews then all you are going to see is reviews by the owner, posing as customers, saying how great the food is. Any actual reviews that warn about this place and how bad it can be will be buried many many pages deep where people generally don't go.

On the other hand if they do what they are doing now you will still see some of the owners fake reviews but you will also see reviews by elite posters interspersed in there as well as posts that people have agreed with about how bad the food is or found the post warning to stay away useful, etc.


This is really the only way social media can work. New information is obviously good, but it makes it easy for good information to get buried.

You can even see this on this forum pretty regularly: have you ever written a reply to a thread that maybe took you 30+ minutes to write, you have great solid information and facts to back up your point, maybe show a little math if its a comp or game related questions... and then once you hit submit you find out you are the last post on page one.

A few hours later if that thread has grown to three pages long its pretty much a guarantee that almost nobody is going to see your post because most people will read the first two or three replies in a thread and then jump to the last page. Doesn't matter how good your post is or if it answered every one of the OP's questions perfectly, once its buried its pretty much gone for good and even the OP will likely never get a chance to read it.


And for all this too: what you see on Yelp now is what they call "Yelp Sort" which is what bumps useful reviews up. There are search sorting options where you can sort by date, by elite posters, by review rating, or by what your social media friends think.

So if you want to just see newest you can... if you want to just see the best reviews, IE: who gave it a 5/5, or worst reviews like what the lowest raters experienced, you can do that too.

 

Excellent post Auggie... as a frequent Yelp poster, that's my understanding as well.

 

I just know that several business owners have said that they paid to advertise and the bad reviews went away.
That is extortion anyway you look at it.
Sorry to have to be the one to tell avid Yelpers, but that is what is happening

 

Auggie: I am a Yelper and thanks for your post. That is pretty much the way I understand how Yelp works too.

BigTip: I'd be interested to know where I can find the concrete that holds your story together. Solid information would be helpful.

 

I get my information from my business owners discussion board. Not an, "I heard..." kind of deal but, "This happened to me" accounts.
I have also been approached by Yelp advertising reps. I have not entered into any agreements with them.
I started this post to educate people to look deeper into the business site that they are researching. All the reviews are available. You just have to search for them.

 

Big Tip

Can you tell us the name of your restaurant so we can see how it is rated on other venues.

Than you.

 

You are saying this:

And then saying this:

So they can't really go away if they are still there...

Really, I think its just perception... but if those guys are really in to having bad reviews in their search on Yelp there are surely ways they can go about it

Personally I don't use Yelp much myself, but the company I am working with is talking with Yelp to integrate online ordering in to their system and so we've had a lot of exposure to them and many of the other social media sites and how they work.

But just to check I took a look locally to me at three places on Yelp that do advertise and pretty much one place has nothing but 4 and 5 star reviews and their first page of reviews were all pretty good. The next place did have three 2 star reviews in its first five and its 8th was a 1 star review... and the last place had a pretty even mix of 2, 3 and 4 star reviews (no 1s or 5s in its first ten results)

So I think its just their perception, that they see what they want to see. Like in gambling (since this is a Las Vegas forum) people remember taking a bad beat in poker, but never remember giving them... or they can have a weekend of gambling and they remember the big wins and come here and tell everybody about it, but they don't tell us about the horrible losses when they couldn't catch a hand or how the slot machine sucked up a c-note in 5 minutes.

 

HMMM I know the local who handles Yelp here very well, need to ask here about this tomorrow, I know that whether it's been a neg or pos I give it always seems to show up on the businesses page where it should by date posted. Gotta ask is that because it is me looking at places I have reviewed and the filter sets it by time frame and others see something different than I do?

 

From the LA Times:

Yelp works to keep suspect reviews off the website. Recently, members of a Southern California business networking group were ordered to stop giving five-star ratings to one another.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-yelp-reviews-20120704,0,1099294,full.story

 

Since we read deep in the reviews on Yelp (and are avid Yelpers ourselves) I have no problem with their business model.

 

you really have to weed through those reviews to see if they seem honest and helpful

take the reviews for the Cosmo hotel

there is a huge number of 1 star reviews where people are saying they would have given zero stars if they could have

rooms not ready for hours, being lied to about when it will be ready, never being notified it is ready even after multiple hours past check in, extremely rude staff. "high tech" functions that don't work, being charged for opening and closing the refrigerator, staff not activating functions in the room and the tech that comes saying yes the front desk just needs to activate that not sure why they sent me (much less were rude to you)

then you have some bone heads and bimbos and dude brahs giving 5 stars and saying "it is so new cool hip and trendy and everyone looks so hip"......"I HAVE NOT STAYED HERE, but if I ever do I am sure it will be like totally tubular awesome like and I will be like a star like"

entire wedding partied treated like dirt for the entire stay.....then next review "I just went to the pool, but it was where all the coolest most glam peeps were, but the lobby was awesome too!! I will stay here one day 5 stars!!"

so yea some reviews are more helpful than others......and when people are having the same issue with the "high tech", rude staff, staff not telling them to sign the stupid IPAD (like everyone just knows this), refusing basic task like providing a receipt, rooms not ready for hours......it becomes much easier to believe those reviews VS some paris hilton wanna-be that was ogled by the door roid head at the pool and thought it was a compliment