Got Yelp?
Hate or Love Yelp?
Yelp is a for profit online review site.
Customers and non-customers post what ever they like about any business or service which then becomes the property of Yelp.
Yelp then charges the business
300.00 to 5000.00 a month
for “enhanced services”.
“Business Owners ‘Yelp’ About Internet Ratings Site”
“But Yelp’s policy is not to remove negative postings. “Instead they removed some positive postings. They refused to remove the bad posting, and then they called me to solicit a business account,” said Kellinger.”
Read and Watch more of this San Francisco Yelp Story
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=so7bfzoyIjI]
Yelp pits small business against small business and is laughing all the way to the bank.
Yelp will only remove false or unrelated libelous reviews if the business owners is a paying advertiser with yelp. Yelp calls this a hosting or enhancement fee its a minimum of 350.00 a month. Its legal extortion.
They use and or fabricate these bad reviews that usually have nothing to do with the business in question as a leveraging tool to hard sell the small business into a monthly protection payment plan that includes the removal of such non-reviews and removal of some competitor businesses that yelp has placed on the pawns website in the first place.
Anatomy Of A Yelp Page
http://www.yelp.com/biz/la-boxing-san-bruno#hrid:dLDAU7sQEmE58T1K0SjUqg
Look at a yelp page you will see “People Who Viewed This Also Viewed…”
The also viewed businesses you see on the right hand side of the screen are In addition to the competitor businesses who pay yelp to be placed right at the top of the pawns yelp page under
“You Might Also Consider”
Yelp charges preys upon small business( the more they pay the more they are protected) to have these competitors removed from their yelp page and lets you choose the one review that you want at the top of your page. Yelp adds competitor business to keep you paying. They work every business against every competitor business to support their “make money party, snort” life style until businesses stop paying.
Yelp is a group of greedy Evil young men and women without moral character.
Yelp is making money hand over fist off of poorly advised small business owners who feel that they have no choice but to pay yelp the monthly extortion fees.
If you don’t pay YELP, employees and their friends post lies about your business and leave them at the top of your yelp page until you do pay. Period.
They put making money for themselves first and will call every month until you sign up and pay 200.oo or more per month.
San Francisco in May – Yelp sucks From the Matt Goyer Blog
* Yelp hires paid �Yelpers� $15 / dollars an hour to write reviews because their business model is not succeeding. The ads for paid Yelpers can be found on Craigslist in every metro area in the U.S. You could call this, � Paid People . Fake Reviews�. * On Friday July 4th , 2008 , the SF Chronicle ran an article about how Yelp removes establishments from Yelp if they complain or expose the Yelp hypocrisy publicly.
Yelp Defamation
Aaron Morris of Morris & Stone LLP,
writes about problems with yelp and other on line review sites.
http://www.businesslawalert.com/tags/yelp/
Blogger reporting on problems with yelp
http://phillips.blogs.com/goc/2008/07/the-yelp-mess.html
Tech Crunch /Calley Nye writes about more problems with yelp
Joseph Hunkins in the Silicon Valley WebGuild writes of more yelp muck
http://www.webguild.org/2008/04/yelping-for-your-business.php#6316
Yelp: very helpful, somewhat sneaky?
http://blog.robwebb2k.com/2007/06/07/yelp-very-helpful-somewhat-sneaky/#comment-1391
October 16, 2008 at 6:55 pm
You are right, yelp is really messed up and cannot be trusted.
November 5, 2008 at 5:45 am
I felt all this time something was seriously wrong with yelp,as i’ve never seen any business owner answer the bad reviews.
Terrible way to make money,it will eventually bite them in the a**
December 2, 2008 at 9:15 pm
Notice that there is no way from the Yelp page to find out any contact information for the company.
We have had all our positive reviews removed. There is no opportunity for us to point out or contradict any incorrect information posted on the website. There are just plain untruths posted here that simply cannot be refuted. Yet it takes a terrible toll on legitimate hard working caring businesses as people are easily mislead by the false information on Yelp.