"At Cre8asite Forums, it's suspected that Yelp.com's employees may even have a hand in writing bad reviews for local businesses to encourage them to purchase into the paid program. A pretty shady operation, don't you think?"

I think you're exposing yourself and SE Roundtable (and Rusty) to a potential libel suit by saying that. You might want to reconsider what you wrote (and don't forget to edit or delete this comment if you change your post).

Reporting rumors and suspicions is one thing. Adding "a pretty shady operation" is quite another, in my opinion.

I am surprised to hear this, I thought Yelp was one of the good ones. It looks like this type of "review removal" has been going on for years with Rip Off Report if you look at this website - http://www.rip-off-bad-business.com which you can see was removed from Google by Rip Off Report http://www.chillingeffects.org/notice.cgi?sID=463 or see it in effect by searcing Google for Bad Business and going to Page 2 you can see where they were removed.

Interesting, I know of some big retailers online that essentially pay off bad reviews received on products on theirs. So instead of posting a bad review of their product they offer the customer a partial refund or discount on future purchases if they delete the review. Review tampering is pretty wide spread on some sites. It make its wonder if you can actually "trust" a sites reviews or not.

I don't trust Yelp one bit. Recently I had a really horrible experience in a particular restaurant. I posted a constructive and honest review of the experience, and found out later that Yelp removed. When I asked them why, Yelp replied with a inane statement saying that "just as e-mail doesn't always get sent to its intended recipient," it's the same as some comments/reviews being rejected for the site. It was a horrible excuse to prevent a restaurant having a negative review posted.

I won't be returning to Yelp again, and I encourage your readers to do the same.

As that article says IT'S NOT TRUE "But it is not true. Businesses cannot pay to rearrange reviews, according to Yelp's Web site. If Easley had paid the $300 a month, she would not have been able to rearrange the reviews -- it's worth noting she has received only perfect 5-star reviews to date." And yes, I'm a HUGE fan of Yelp - http://natasharobinson.yelp.com

Wow. Sounds like most rating places though (although there seems to be some confusion around the whole issue). I know that our local newspaper rates all the businesses throughout the year, but I used to work there. First on the list are paying customer (i.e. those who take out ads). If you don't take out ads, doesn't matter how the readership votes. You can't win. It doesn't suprise me - although on the internet I almost expected less bias because of less overhead and more competition (and fiercer setbacks by users who find out!). Yelp.com isn't used much in most of Canada... so at least I don't have to worry about it.

Yelp does in fact remove negative reviews for paying advertisers. I have placed some negative reviews only to have them removed without explanation once the business became a paid advertiser. The bottom line is that a review website cannot play fair when it's accepting advertising dollars from the businesses being reviewed.

I complete agree with this article. I recently heard the same thing from local business owners. Bad business.

Yelp is not trustworthy. Reviews are far to frequently manipulated. It's not a site that just allow people to post a review and it stays there. There is obvisouly politics involved with yelp insiders.

There is more yelp news if you google "yelp mess" or "yelp sucks." Yelp sure has managed to make a lot of people mad.

My personal dealings with them have found them to be highly unethical and willing to do anything to sustain there business model.

Yelp needs to get yelped. Here are links for more stories:

http://phillips.blogs.com/goc/2008/07/the-yelp-mess.html

San Francisco Chronicle articles - two different pieces run

http://cbs5.com/consumer/yelp.business.complaints.2.820867.html

UK Register
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/13/yelp_sales_pitch/page4.html

http://cbs5.com/wrapper_consumer/seenon/Yelp.Internet.ratings.2.787400.html

Yelp is personally and legally responsible for its actions. I think it is a matter of time until everyone figures out that yelp is not immune to being sued for third party comments.

This extortion model of advertisong alone is enough to hang the administration of yelp.com. Now that the cat is out of the box, it's going to be hard to get it back in.
Yelp does control the algorithms in which the ads appear. They also manipulate SEO so that when someone googles a business they suck them in. They are purposefully using business names and brands to lure them in.

They also show competitors on the same page and everything is very controlled by yelp.com. Yelp.com may be the first major company to lose the immunity provided by the law because yelp.com actively engaged in misconduct by manipulating reviews, deleting reviews, and adding reviews by paid staffers.

All it will take is a large litigation firm and the whole yelp.com website and infrastructure will come down. Once a sub poena is issued many misconducts, unethical behavior, and manipulations will be found.

The best thing for the administration is to remove libelous content that is reported by the businesses and cut out the mean and personal reviews. They should sell yelp.com before more people catch wind of this.

Lately I've been hearing a lot of yelp gripes. The obvious solution is to allow customers and business owners engage and resolve issues. A great example is getsatifaction.com. Customers can leave a feedback thread for a company and the company can reply back on the same thread. This inspired us to create a site that was more directed to local businesses instead of corporations.

Unfortunately, the owners of yelp.com ,Jeremy Stoppelman and company are too immature and inexperienced to run a business that requires maturity and a sense of righteousness.

This company is begging to be sold to a more ethical company like google. It's a shame that they have ruined the spirit of web 2.0. Yelp will not become mainstream until the likes of Jeremy Stoppelman and Nish Nadaraja are eliminated from this company.

BTW, the founders also were part of paypal and they created the same kind of misconduct before paypal was sold.

I've been using yelp for over 3 years and have come to notice that unscrupulous business owners, and their relatives tend to use fraudulent accounts, or enlist friends, to enter pie-in-the-sky reviews to skew their business ratings toward a more favorable rating (4 to 5 star). The site was a great idea at first, but now it seems that yelp openly encourages this kind of fraudulent voting, resulting in the promotion of exceptionally poor quality businesses/restaurants. I've also noticed that many "sponsored" businesses have suspiciously high ratings, though the businesses themselves are far from quality.

yelp.com is a joke. Most reviews are ONLY positive. There are TONS of negatives one, That are true but the site terminates the negative reviews and the users account, EVEN IF THEY ARE IN THE GUIDE LINES.
They favour businesses and not the consumer. I myself had experienced bad service and when I gave the place a bad reviewed.* I found a cooked roach in my food* The YELP site had it removed. I even went to places that had great reviews and had bad service and yes the owner and workers wrote the reviews.
So, its a joke basically. They say trust the site that the consumers rate for you but its a joke.
I dont trust yelp and many dont. They wouldnt be on the ripoff report if they werent a rip off to begin with.

Below's a thread about someone giving a company a bad review, and then a Yelp employee going out of their way to contact and eventually harass the reviewer. When the reviewer blocks the employee's communications to avoid further harassment, the employee then opens a public thread, and divulges private emails.

The employee at first vehemently denies being paid by Yelp, but later gets caught confessing to the whole thing:
"yelps pays me a lot of money to protect its sponsors. its a good racket. dont blow it for me."
The fact that this same employee who began the harassment has also given the other company a glowing review, is completely unethical to say the least.

See for yourself, and quickly, before Yelp pulls the thread down to cover up their tracks:
http://www.yelp.com/topic/san-francisco-calling-you-out-atlas-plumbing-review

I am all for freedom of speech! I am, however, against the way Yelp manipulates the reviews posted by its users. Business owners beware!!! In every business you're going to get mixed reviews, its simply impossible to satisfy everybody. I search Yelp to help me find good places to take my business and I have noticed that on some sites that I have revisited the GOOD comments have been DELETED!!!(or arent there) What happened to two sides of one story. Is Yelp trying help business owners and consumers or is it trying to degrade them? For those of us that would like to recommend a business I wouldn't go to yelp because its likely that your comment will never be read!!! Frankly, this absolutely DISGUSTS me I will never use yelp again and would never recommend this site to anyone that is looking for factual information!!!

they should just fess up...real isn't real. at least chow is moderated....

Might as well get paid if i'm going to give content: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090225162712AAoCqYF

When I first stumbled on too Yelp, my small business had already received a few great reviews and only one bad one by someone I am almost positive is my competitor since they gave me such a harsh and unfounded review saying that they gave me one star because they didn't like the colors on my building blah, blah, blah and gave the two stores that they own shinning reviews. I just basically ignored it thinking "Who looks at Yelp.com anyway?" Then a few weeks later when I was searching for my website on google I noticed that yelp was the number 4 post and all of the good reviews were gone! Then I had numerous customers coming into my store asking why their good review was taken off Yelp.com. Seriously, this is absurd, my only hope is that more people get the word out about how unethical and basically slanderous yelp.com is and they are shut down for good.

Yelp definitely manipulates the reviews. A phone representative offered my father $350 to remove a negative review he'd received. After he declined, the positive reviews mysteriously disappeared. Yelp used its algorithm excuse to defend itself.
But the one negative reviewer had no picture on her profile, and no other reviews. The positive reviewers had legitimate profiles and were active yelpers. Go figure.