Ongoing Yelp Drama

February 04 2010

By Chadwick Meyer

Okay, now I'm going to yelp about Yelp. We've had some ongoing drama with the popular business review site Yelp.com. We created a business profile a while back, so people would have an opportunity to review our work and give good or bad reviews of our service. But when we went back to add more photos a few months later it had mysteriously disappeared. So we created another profile, and discovered the new profile had a funky "-2" at the end (http://www.yelp.com/biz/gutensite-walnut-creek-2). It turns out old profile still existed, at the same address, minus the -2, but was not discoverable with the search.

So we asked Yelp if they could remove the duplicate and merge the two accounts together. But instead we got a response saying that the new profile was also being removed from the search because we weren't a local business. This of course is totally ridiculous. We have a local Walnut Creek business license, are members of the Walnut Creek Chamber of Commerce, have a local office in Walnut Creek that employs local employees who do work for local clients. Sure we have a website, and we also do work for a national and international audience, but this does not make us non-local. Our services are computer based, but that is no less legitimate a target for reviews than someone who trims trees.

We complained to them and got no response. Several days passed and fortunately for us a Yelp salesman called and wanted to sell us advertising. I told him the problem and he realized he needed to fix this before he could make his pitch. So he kindly talked to the powers that be, and without comment or apology, our profile was turned back on.

I was considering advertising with Yelp, but I decided it would be in our best interest to first acquire some reviews from any of our past customers. So I asked a couple long term clients if they would do us a big favor and consider giving us a review on Yelp. Several agreed and the next day we had 5 great reviews, which moved us up from #8 for "Web Design" in Walnut Creek, to #3.

The next day I looked at our profile to see if others had reviewed us, and I discovered that all the reviews had been removed ("suppressed"). Evidently Yelp has an automated filtering system (fatally flawed) that is supposed to flag suspicious reviews, to ensure that spam or malicious reviews from competitors don't clog the review process. They say that because it has no human interaction it is unbiased. This is supposed to alleviate their responsibility, but: 1) humans write the rules of these algorithms, so it's not really unbiased. 2) we would like some human interaction, because all of our reviews were 100% legitimate. So that's not comforting. Don't blame the robots people.

In the end, their filtering system is so tragically inept that it deleted 100% of our totally legitimate reviews, so now we have no reviews, we are back to #8, and anyone that wants to read what other clients had to say about us, is unable to because Yelp's review system is biased towards young, tech savvy "yelpers" with too much time on their hands, who are able to actively cultivate an online identity and "credibility" as defined by Yelp's algorithm. And meanwhile, real business owners in the b2b sphere, are busy running their businesses and are not going to be active yelpers, so all their reviews are going to be dismissed and suppressed, even though their reviews should be particularly noted because of the extra effort they made to create and confirm a new account, learn a new system, and post a review during their busy day.

So what's the moral to the story? I don't know. Things aren't what they seem? Yelp brands itself as a local review site, but in reality it masks a caste system of Elite Yelpers and robotic censorship that skew it's credibility. But unfortunately, like Google, you can't ignore them. Most people don't understand or care why you don't rank high in Google, or don't have good reviews on Yelp. They just won't find you, or trust you, because a site they trust (Google or Yelp) doesn't say anything favorable about you. It's like being a nerd in high-school all over again, if you don't hang out with the cool kids no one will notice you. So I believe you should still have a Yelp profile, and you should ask people if they ever use Yelp and if so if they would consider reviewing you (if not don't let them waste their time). But that's it.

You can't stress it. If you do good old-fashioned work, it will pay off. Your clients will tell their friends over a cup of coffee or a beer in the backyard, and word will get around. It's easy to get caught up in these little fads, and they are interesting, but at the end of the day only 30 people viewed our profile on Yelp last month, compared to 10,000 unique visitors to our website, 90% of whom came directly by typing in our URL. Which means that most people still find us because a friend recommended us. That is priceless. I wish Yelp wouldn't delete our client's reviews, but oh well, it's not going to affect our business.

Tags : yelp, drama, flawed, filter, bogus, suppress, delete, algorithm

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