Why is Yelp hiding all of the Good Reviews and only showing the Bad Reviews?

This was submitted by a Consumer who would like to remain anonymous.

I have read many articles online about Yelp and how they filter out or hide good reviews for businesses that don’t advertise with them in fact I think I might be a victim. When I first started Yelping I was very impressed with the web sites functionality and the fact that I could voice my opinion about my experience at a restaurant or any other place that offers services or goods, and I was excited to get my business listed on Yelp. But then the phones calls started coming in asking if I would be interested in advertising with Yelp to increase my businesses exposure and to get more customers, but I politely declined the offer. But then for almost a month I was getting calls from Yelp almost daily from different reps who were very pushy and aggressive. I even asked the Yelp sales rep if they could note that I had received numerous phone calls and each time they would say that they would make a note, but sure enough the next day Yelp was calling me back offering their advertising program again. This lasted for about a month and then all of a sudden they stopped calling me I was so relieved that I was finally being left alone. Then a few months past and I noticed I had got a bad  review from a person who clearly created their Yelp account simply to bash my company. I felt that it was a competitor company trying to bash our good reputation, so I tried to resolve the issue with the person who was not even using a real name and would not respond to me. Then I received a good review from a happy customer and Yelp filtered it out of view under their filtered section, so I tried to contact Yelp and they said that they have a system set up to stop possible fake reviews by Yelpers who are not very active or basically have no credibility, but this made no sense because this person who wrote the good review had written about 10 other reviews and was displaying their real name and even a photo as opposed to the negative review with the fake name no photo and no other reviews other than the one that was written for my company. Needless to say that the filtering system is flawed. So after getting very irritated with this situation and clearly Yelp was not willing to help me to resolve this issue, because when I did call the girl that answered the phone was a sales rep and she was basically laughing at my situation and was very rude. I finally decide to just let it go, but then again another bad review shows up and it’s from a Yelper with a fake name no photo and no other reviews again. Why are the negative reviews allowed to show but the good review was being hidden and then it hit me maybe they are doing this because I declined to advertise so I started to research and I found that a lot of people out there had been experiencing the same issues I was and many people are calling Yelp extortionist, scammers and other nasty names. Now at this point I am completely at a loss and I am now getting calls from potential customers saying that they read the negative reviews on Yelp and they are afraid to use our services, so we started asking people to give us a try and if you they had a good outcome please share their experience on Yelp, and if their outcome was negative please feel free to share that as well. Well we end up getting a few good reviews and again they were all being filtered so within a few months we had accumulated 9 Good Reviews all hidden under the filtered section and still 2 negative reviews from obviously bogus Yelp profiles, so at this point I decide to clear everything I had written in the about us section on our Yelp Business page. I removed all of our photos and completely stripped our Yelp business profile as to lower the search engine rankings and to not attract as much attention like it did before, and within a month our hits dropped by half which was a good thing since Yelp would only display the negative lies written by our competitor companies. Now since our Yelp business page hits have dropped tremendously Yelp has decided to remove the 2 bad reviews and has allow a few good ones to show, so the moral of this story is if you are not happy with Yelp then do not use their service and try to avoid giving them any exposure online by writing good content on your business profile. If you are not happy with your Yelp business page try stripping all of the content and photos from your business page remove any links you may have created to promote your Yelp business page and help to lower their power as online extortionist’s. Remember that Yelp is built by the people who use it, so if we can spread the truth about Yelp then we can minimize the future damage. This company has potential to be great if they could give business owners a way to clean up their reputation especially when the reviews are fake or done by someone who is clearly being shady. Yelp also needs to add a call center for issues like this because the only people you can call at Yelp are the sales reps and any issues you have are handled through email that never get answered or at least in my case. Yelp needs to help the business owners so that they will want to advertise not allow people to  bash the businesses, because eventually they are gonna have a site filled with bad reviews and unhappy business owners and if Im not mistaken that’s how yelp makes their money.

I hope this all makes sense I wrote it fast and did not have time to do revisions sorry for any typos or grammatical errors.

If you feel that you have been a victim of Yelp or if you disagree and think that Yelp is Awesome then post your replies below.