BEWARE: Yelp.com is a fraud!
Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to call your attention to a very nefarious website called yelp.com, which you should avoid at all costs.
Yelp.com has gained sort of a cult following as some sort of a reputable site where you can supposedly see how people in your community have rated local businesses. Well, I can tell you from firsthand experience that yelp.com is NOT reputable and they are NOT honest. In fact, Yelp even has the nerve to give themselves the slogan “Real People, Real Reviews”, when it is anything but real people & real reviews on their site.
I wrote 6 reviews on the yelp.com site about 6 local businesses that I did business with: 3 of them were positive reviews and 3 of them were negative reviews. My negative reviews were very thoughtfully and carefully written, and did not violate any of Yelp’s terms of services. One of my negative reviews, for example, was for a taxicab company which never showed up to pick me up from my apartment, even though I waited 60 extra minutes past the arrival time for them to come, and after calling the taxicab company 5 times to check on where they were. (“Just 5 more minutes, Mr. Rose.”)
Within 60 days of posting my 3 negative reviews (for 3 different companies) to Yelp’s website, all 3 of my negative reviews had been removed from the respective companies’ profiles on the Yelp site. Interestingly enough, the negative reviews still show up FOR MY EYES ONLY in my personal & private profile when I log into the Yelp website, but they have miraculously been HIDDEN on the companies’ pages themselves. (This is extremely detestable behavior on Yelp’s part, because they give the consumer THE IMPRESSION that their reviews are still active, but the consumer really has no idea that their reviews have been REMOVED from the Yelp website unless they go BACK to the companies’ pages.)
So I started asking around, and lo and behold, many of my friends who had written negative reviews for businesses started noticing the same thing: their negative reviews were still in their own personal profiles (for their eyes only), but their negative reviews were NOWHERE TO BE FOUND on the company pages in question.
This phenomenon is starting to get some national press, too, but not nearly enough of an outcry as there should be over this potentially criminal activity. Check out these articles for starters:
Chicago Tribune – Chicago Proprietors Add To Yelp Allegations
East Bay Express – Yelp and the Business of Extortion
AP News – Social Web Sites Face Transparency Questions
Washington Times – Yelp.com’s Ethics Questioned
Consumerist – More Business Owners Accuse Yelp Of Review Extortion
SFist – Yelp Still Freaking Users Out
Yet people are still just sort of shrugging this off, as if this is something that we should be okay turning our back on.
The Chicago Tribune article is particularly interesting, because it highlights that Yelp is blackmailing companies for BOTH removing negative reviews AND for posting positive reviews. EVERYBODY is getting FUCKED HERE — the businesses AND the consumers! The only people not getting fucked are Yelp themselves!
So I emailed yelp.com and asked them about my reviews being removed… they only replied to my emails with a form letter directing me to the FAQ’s on the site. I replied back several times, asking to have a conversation with a supervisor about this issue, and they continually replied with form letters directing me to the FAQ’s on their site. After trying to make live human contact with yelp.com on 5 separate occasions, I finally gave up.
The rest of my post here is secondhand “hearsay” information, but I started bitching about this enough that a friend of mine told me about his friend whose business is on yelp.com. He told me that shortly after signing up for yelp.com, his friend got a call from the folks at yelp who offered him a deal that he just couldn’t refuse. If he paid yelp.com $300 per month to advertise his company on their website, then yelp.com would suppress all negative reviews about his business. Sounds like Yelp has figured out a good little moneymaking business on the side, huh? And this explains why some negative reviews appear on the site for SOME companies, but not for other companies. Those companies who allow the negative reviews to show up about their own business are the ones who are truly the more honest & upstanding companies… because they didn’t pay to have them suppressed. My friend also told me that his friend is allowed by yelp.com to write an unlimited number of positive reviews about his own company, under multiple identities, without suppression.
Pretty shady stuff, huh?
So, folks, I urge you to NEVER go to yelp.com and NEVER support this fraudulent, criminal website which pretends to be something that it is not.
Instead, I encourage you to use Citysearch.com instead, where I have not encountered these same problems. Citysearch.com actually DOES seem to have “real reviews by real people.”
3/26/2009 Update:
My friend Herbert Barry Woodrose goes into way more depth on this topic over on his blog. Be sure to check out what he has to say about this topic. It is EXTREMELY INSIGHTFUL, and he has done more research than I have on this topic. Looks like I was right all along. Yelp is running a completely criminal and corrupt business.
And be sure to read the comments below… where the story is just beginning.
If you’ve ever asked yourself, “What happened to my negative Yelp review?” or “Where did my Yelp review go?”, now you know the answer.
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This is insane. This is straight up Mafia tactics. First) create a site that can potentially cause trouble for businesses by printing ‘real’ reviews of services and products by consumers. Then, go around to the businesses and tell them that for a fee, you can ‘protect’ them from the trouble you are causing them. I expect our government to work this way, because they can get away with it. I even, now, expect Microsoft to work this way, taking money from Spyware companies to change their ratings and allow them past whatever passes for security on Microsoft. The dumb thing is that this company certainly isn’t big enough to get away with this. They can certainly be taken down.
I urge you to go past the usual ‘letter to the editor’ and get down to really bothering a local news station. If you can get Channel Whatever to go down there and yell “why are you taking money to suppress negative reviews by customers!”, then I might even watch TV once.
I concur. My small business had 3 five star reviews, soon after one disappeared, now there is only one review left. Dishonest and shady buisiness practices aren’t something that we should take lightly. If you have to pay to have your “real” reviews show up, or if your competitor can pay to suppress them, this entire website is a big fat JOKE. -JJ San Francisco small business owner.
Yeah, Yelp’s been on my radar for several months now since one of my clients got ripped off. He got talked into buying into Yelp’s advertising program for business owners (to the tune of $325 a month for 6 months…)
It sucked, big time.
If you care to read about the other side of Yelp that most reviewers won’t get a chance to see (since it’s from a business owner’s perspective, you can check out the entire documentary of what happened: Yelp Advertising)
It is a very long read but it goes into quite a bit of depth about why Yelp.com sucks
Hope you enjoy it and perhaps it’ll stop other biz owners from getting ripped off by Yelp.
Raymond Fong
I also think yelp sucks, too. Their internal search is also terrible. If you try to search for a specific business, well, good luck!
There are better sites out there than yelp, and a lot of new sites that have been cropping up. You have the established sites like citysearch, and newer sites fairplayreviews.com
Everything that has happen since I was banned from Yelp still suggests that they haven’t gotten any better.
http://coffeevancouver.ca/2009/05/06/how-i-got-banned-from-yelp/#comments
Especially the bottom of the page. A women named Julie says:
“I got an email today from yelp saying they’ll delete me if I don’t remove my link from my reviews … Haven’t decided what to do.”
So although they are now letting people know they are still as cheap as they were before. . .
YELP in HELL!
We pray YELP goes bankrupt and sinks to the bottom of hell, and takes its MAFIA YELPERS with them. We pray that GOD shows no mercy for all the damage and EXTORTION they have inflicted upon small business owners and the children they support. YELP is a den of snakes and deserve to BURN for the lies and slander they spread on the world wide web.
PRAY PSALMS 140 FOR THEIR DESTRUCTION!
Say 5 times: “Archangel Raphael destroy YELP now!”
I can’t wait until Yelp dies away. Their tagline “Real People, Real Reviews” is just a marketing ploy. I gave a scathing review to one of their sponsors, and 2 years later, 18 reviews later, 7 friend connections later, not a single one of my reviews shows up to any user other than myself when i am logged in.
Unfortunately I trusted Yelp for a recommendation, not realizing that the moving company Yelp referred me, Celtic Moving & Storage, paid to have all of their negative feedback removed. The moving company sucked, and I blame Yelp as much as Celtic for my awful experience and property damage. I never would have hired the company without the positive Yelp reviews.
So, yes, any awful company is smart to pay for a service that can make a bad company look good, but who is Yelp going to pay to make themselves look respectable?
Thanks so much for your feedback, Estelle.
Yes, hopefully Yelp will die away as the word spreads about their behavior.
In the meantime, just last month, I was thrilled to make the discovery of angieslist.com which really DOES have real reviews! Angieslist doesn’t reviews restaurants and nightlife, but they specialize in handymen, electricians, moving companies, etc.
Angieslist.com has been a real great resource for me in just one month!
Please check out the new website at http://www.yelpiscorrupt.org. You can also tweet at yelpiscorrupt. Email is at yelpiscorrupt@gmail.com or mine. I’m ready to go after these criminals- are you?
Bob, thank you for taking the stance against Yelp with your website!