Reputation Armor

Recently our company ReputationArmor.com has received several calls from businesses that have ALL had very similar and alarming experiences with Yelp.com. I used to like to read yelp and the reviews on their site based of the fact that they showed good, fair, and poor reviews about a company and Yelp seemed not to be concerned with the ratio of good vs poor reviews.

As of recently I feel that Yelp MIGHT be doing something a little fishy behind the scenes. 9 out of 10 businesses that contacted us claimed that Yelp.com removed positive reviews about them from their Yelp account. The businesses also claimed that yelp is not allowing new positive reviews to be published or approved when submitted. One dental company claims that they had a client leave them positive feedback and the feedback never showed up on Yelp. The company them mentioned this to their loyal client base and others tried to leave them reviews that never showed up. Other companies are claiming that this is happening to them as well.

Some even claim that yelp is using these tactics in order to force them in to a paid account or advertising account with yelp. There is a great article that talks about the Yelp Sponsorship program located at: http://articles.latimes.com/2009/feb/11/business/fi-lazarus11