Yelp is crooked and I can prove it.
 

Well, maybe not since they remove entire strings of reviews.

Anyway, don't trust what you read. I know, I was burned badly to the tune of $6000 and I did a review explaining in detail what went wrong with a contractor I hired to do AC installation at my home. The whole thread of reviews is gone.

I am a contractor.

You're experience?

same.
yelp.
sucks.

They are now posting scores for restaurants that were put out by the department of health for violations etc. It’s interesting, living in the city for as long as I have you realize that unless the place was built within a month you’re going to have issues of some type.

Yelp Google and hotel review sights are ALL just extortion schemes with a pretty face.


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Give a store a mix review; great product, owner sucks.

Post and it stay up for less than 24 hrs.

eBay started this - years ago (I was one of the original users going back to the mid-1990s when it was still innovative and interesting). A few years later it became all about who would pay them more when they changed their previously objective feedback system allowing sellers to be able to essentially buy themselves better ratings. If you were a lousy seller with a clear pattern of mistreating customers getting bad feedback (and there certainly were some who deserved it!) it no longer mattered since you could pay off eBay and they’d scrub the negative feedback away (“pending investigation” or something which would never happen and eventually it’d just magically disappear). Wiped clean (“like with a cloth?”) It’s really not unlike another online P-car site I belonged to years ago. I got sick and tired of the same vendors / parts hawkers constantly getting away with murder while everyone else got held to another standard / set of rules. I’ll never go back. Yea I know... private companies can do what they want but I’m a private individual and so can I - neither company will ever see another dollar of mine.

It would be great to have objective reviews online away from the potential corrupting influence of money / bribing the review host site but it’s a difficult model to implement in practice and stay financially solvent. Angie’s List has done so to good effect but how long will it continue? At the end of the day SOMEONE has to pay for the site to operate / host (and constantly risk / fend off lawsuits from pissed-off scheisters who don’t like being called out - big $$$) and the minute a revenue stream is found (advertisers, donors, whomever) it inevitably comes with the potential for exploitation, manipulation and distortion of facts.

Yelp is good for seeing what’s around or open and little else. I don’t put much stake in the reviews. In addition to the above problems I know that companies pay people to trash their competition online (including on yelp) by making up plausible-sounding bad customer service stories (a friend of mine got approached about doing it). So yea it happens and there’s no way to prevent it.

The best rule is the advice my late grandfather gave me years ago: “believe none of what you hear and half of what you see”, to which I’d add “especially if it’s from the internet! Best to view it as mindless entertainment and nothing else”.

If you pay their fees then you’ll have a great rating. If you don’t, well then the reviews will probably at least be honest. Though I’ve noticed recently that some restaurants don’t even show up on Yelp, I assume because they aren’t paying? Just remember that if you aren’t paying for a service, then somebody else is.

This is old news

https://www.engadget.com/2014/09/02/yelp-escapes-extortion-lawsuit/

TLDR: [...]the plaintiffs lost because their claims didn't meet the requirements for an extortion case. They couldn't demonstrate that they had a right to hold on to those good reviews, or that Yelp had no right to demand payment. In other words, it's still possible that Yelp was pressuring stores to buy ads at the risk of losing positive buzz; it's just that no one was entitled to that buzz in the first place

Seems common knowledge that Yelp is rotten and corrupt, yet they keep humming along with most people thinking it's an honest, altruistic enterprise. I keep wondering why some show like "60 Minutes" doesn't blow them up.

Bad Yelp reviews?SmileWavy

Yell-extortion

There's Yelp looking for protection money.

and there are customers who want to punish a business over something trivial.

^ exactly

That would be like the pot calling the kettle black.

Same thing happened when I posted a bad review about a car dealer that tried to rip me off. I posted and two days later it was gone. So I posted another one stating that they can take this down as much as they want and I will just keep posting it. I copied and saved the review and every now and then when I am bored I just re post it.

I hate to be Captain Obvious here, but that's what car dealers do. (some exceptions)

That's like saying This lawyer I hired was nasty, and charged too much.

I hate this online review stuff I have one negative review that I know about, and it was someone who was never a customer, I sp9,,,,,,,,,,,..........z kja

To this day does that keep happening? You don't by chance have less than 3 reviews posted, do you? They'll normally take down your reviews if you have only 1 or 2.

Yelp is crooked and I can prove it.
 

I got a bad google review from a salesperson I refused to talk to. Wouldn’t take his card as I told him it would be a waste of his time since I had no need for his services. So the ****er, not even a client, goes on google and puts a bad review up. Spineless bag of **** enabled by a crap system.


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I don't read Yelp. I assume the bad actors have paid the extortion for good ratings and the good actors have refused to pay out of principle and been punished with bad ratings.

I find it hard to believe they can continue to be in business. Yelp is a scam, sort of like when the mafia used to come to your business and ask for money to keep the peace...

I do have more than three reviews and all the others beside this one are positive reviews and those have never been removed. How fast do they take down reviews of people who only have 1 or 2? How do you accumulate reviews if they remove them?

My step daughter owns one of the longer running and more successful restaurants in our town. YELP is a scam, she deals with it all the time. Luckily for her, her core customer base doesn't pay attention to that crap. If you were newer in business or had a smaller customer base it would suck!

Yelp sux. Google does as well for that matter. At least for a business. If you pay for top positions in searches you have to pay for "clicks". This is where the scam comes in. There is no way to tell if the click hits are real. Its like printing money for the search engines. Google Analytics has a stat that shows the source location of clicks. One month showed 95% of clicks coming from Estonia. No problem, except this was for a small retail shop in Louisville, KY. Its a scam. But you absolutely must be on Google search.

I bumped into a friend of mine I had not seen in a while. He told me about some side money he said was easy money. Some company would send him a email with a lot of links. All he had to do was click on each one and scroll to a second page. He was paid enough to make it worth his time. It took a few minutes a day to do. He said it was all to generate hits on a advertisement. That was 10 years ago. Most likely they have bots to do that now.

About 12 years ago we lost a positive review because the poster only had the one review. It seemed really quick, like in a few weeks. Now I can't say, but I think it takes a few months.

I suppose you could accumulate reviews if you make reviews for other businesses, but that doesn't seem to be why your one review comes down. My guess is the business you keep trying to give a bad review to has an account and is convincing Yelp that you're review is a personal grudge or something.

Most negative reviewers cannot write a succinct coherent review, I make an attempt to read but generally discount it.

It can be amusing reading.

I may still check it out for information on a place, and if it is all glowing roses I might avoid for some place else. NO business dealing with the walk in public around here can have a 100% satisfaction rate.

There are people that go around in life looking to be offended.

This guy from Seattle said it best several years ago:
https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/guest-what-is-yelp-an-impartial-review-site-or-an-aggressive-ad-company/


He's a genius.

So, is there an alternative?

Word of mouth and common sense


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Well, that's easy to say but not very helpful. Sometimes one has to find a business of a nature that they have not done that type of business before. In my case I took the referral of another contractor (whom I didn't hire in the long run) and then took to Yelp to expose the guy. I'm sure he pays the ransom.

In another case, I hired a painter for a customer job and he did only OK. But his Yelp is 100%. He told me that he pays not only for the rating but for being suggested at the top of the list for a return call within an hour.

That's all well and good, you want a referral service you pay. But if you suck, that should show up.

ask for references. call them. do the homework you used to have to do. if you want it easy you're gonna get yelp and other extortion scams. the very idea of a referral service should make people sick.

I don't think that about Angie's List. Although there is some gaming there as well.

This is a good read:

https://thehustle.co/botto-bistro-1-star-yelp/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

I love this idea from the link in maxnine11's post! ^

https://www.facebook.com/groups/848796005457291/?ref=bookmarks

They tried that extortion stuff on me and I told them pound sand. One or two fabricated bad reviews, but the rest are legit.

Sounds a lot like Congress...Seriously, I've never placed much faith in online reviews.

Threads here that ask for opinions on various tools, appliances, etc. I have much more faith in. In a way, proof the old word of mouth still works.

how about we all post negative reviews of yelp on yelp?

or use Google maps for the HQ of yelp...

Since I got royally ripped off by an HVAC contractor, posted my account of events and complaints, and had the whole thing disappear, I have made a solid acquaintance with another contractor in a different trade. He has solid top to bottom 5-star reviews. He pretty much deserves them but he protects them by paying $500/month to Yelp. As a result he is able to charge more to cover the expense. He's a small operation.

I just revisited his Yelp page and it has been updated removing most of the older reviews making it short and sweet and 5-star all the way (to the bank).

better business bureau
buy good rating

i have a man-crush on my electricain and plumber.

i met both of them thru that app.."next door" (something like that). all we did was send out a question to the hood,, "anyone know a good plumber?"

boom..everyone gets chatty about their experiences. two guys stood head and shoulders above the rest..we chose one.

this same event happened when my water line from the meter to house sprung a leak when a mysterious digging bar shaped dent formed in the copper pipe. the landscaper? "wasnt me"..hahhaha.. cost me $80, and was worth the guilty facial expression on the landscaper guy. from that point forward, he did everything i asked. he moved plants around for me. :)