"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.

I really think yelp sucks, and some of these accusations would not surprise me in the least. Has anyone ever tried their internal search? Good luck with that because their own internal search engine doesn't work very well.

It's probably best for people to stick with the established sites like citysearch, and there are a lot of new business review sites cropping up all the time like fairplayreviews.com

My company was offered an "advertising opportunity" - pay $299/mo and we will minimize the placement of negative reviews of your business.

Curiously, at the time of the "generous" offer, our business DIDN'T EVEN EXIST ON YELP.

This outrageous sum is way out of our budget... We declined.

Sure enough, Yelp added our company's listing shortly after the offer was made - and the next thing we know BAD REVIEWS are showing up.

Illegal? Can it destroy a business? Probably not. But can it make a business' competitors lives easier? You betcha. They probably paid the extortion money. In every normal country in the world Yelp.com's true name would be Shakedown.com

if a business doesn't agree to pay their fees, yelp removes your good reviews also! Countless good reviews have disappeared while competitors seem stacked with them still. check out the businesses with 100's of good reviews versus those with only a few. Undoubtedly, the numerous reviews are for the business that succumbed to paying fees for enhanced listing services. So not only are there no or few bad reviews now, but also only a few good ones allowed to remain on some of the business listings. How can yelp.com have any credibility left as a "review" site?

Yelp is constantly deleting positive reviews adn keeping negative reviews. Many people write ridiculous comments and thse are left for years where other clients write positve comments only to be taken down because of some mysterious "algorithm" that appararently Yelp has no power to control. Of course this is nothing but blackmail in an attempt to get more paid advertisers. If yelp is about free speech then why not leave all the reviews up? If yelp is taking down reviews they should have good reason to do so and should be able to back up their decision with evidence. Yelp should be sued by a class action suit. Yelp is very unethical.

Yelp.com does not care about providing useful or correct information. Many Laotian restaurants (including Vientian Cafe, Champa Garden, Green Papaya Deli, Sabai Dee) on Yelp are incorrectly categorized as Thai or Chinese, but Yelp's CEO and product manager do not care to fix that mistake. They're unwillingly to add Laotian as a restaurant category. Considering that Yelp is based in SF, you'd think that they'd be more open-minded as far as ethnic cuisines are concerned. I guess the only way to get Yelp's management to expand its cuisine categories is by paying them???

I am a small business, and built my yelp account up to 8 great reviews, during which time I've been in discussion with a rep to pay for more advertising...I haven't yet committed, and I'm now down to 1 review! It seems that the only reviewers thich aren't taken off are those who yelp a lot, and the only way to get such yelper reviews is to advertise with them to get more yelper customers! Now that's a way to get businesses to sign up!

Yelp.com is totally bogus. I started a Yelp.com review for a friend whom is also my hair stylist. Ok so she's my friend, but I drive 30 miles to get my hair done & will wait rather than go closer to home(i tried & had my hair butchered). Since my review, she started to get more reviews & Yelp contacted her to advertise. She declined. She is not web savvy and was not sure if it would benefit her. Since then, she has had over 50 reviews in 5 months yet only 3 show! Mine does not even show in my yelp account as if I never wrote it. These reviews were honest customers that were told at the shop to post their review no matter if positive or negative. Yelp's response is that these reviewers are not constant active reviewers so they are removed. Wait! Are the reviews supposed to help businesses or is it just a ploy? Seems that yelp wants a smaller # of constantly active reviewers, and lots of paid advertisers. You can not punish a business & remove reviews because the reviewer doesn't review other businesses. Where's the honesty in this? My friend received a lot of business from Yelp. What a shame, she is now considering advertising with them. Guess Yelp know what their doing & does or can have businesses by the balls. Too bad CitySearch isn't a real presence on the web.

Yelp is a complete racket! I have had eight 5 star reviews removed but one disgruntled associate loses her job and spends the next two months becoming an elite yelper just so she can post a fake negative review about my business. And, it will never be removed. Now they call weekly to get me to advertise on their site. They want me to pay them money to facilitate a blank bitching board for any peon to write any biased review about my business without any verification or recourse? Oh Yes, now businesses can respond but that doesn't affect the star rating which is what clients see when they do a search. I am astonished that there is no legal recourse. I am so looking forward to Yelp going down. They are greedy bastards and deserve to be sued into oblivion.

I have posted negative reviews about a restaurant called Zyggyz in Champaign Urbana. Curiously, they have disappeared. Zyggyz advertizes on their site that they have “4 stars” from Yelp!! So Yelp helps them by removing negative reviews. Sorry yelp and Sorry Zyggyz, this shady business would just not do !

I was on Yelp from March 2009 until July 2009 and honestly it was the worst thing in the world. It wasn't the deleting reviews that turned me off. I didn't have any deleted reviews. But it was the threads. I gave what I thought was good advice to the people that needed it on the thread and the next thing I know I'm being called a robot, someone who believes what people dictate, having no sense of humor and being told go to barefoot and pregnant. The thing that got me was these frequent yelpers decided to take my answers and copy them because one yelper had an ROTC rejection and found out that a review of the day was selected at random. After that I decided to close my account. Then a month later these people discovered that I closed my account and decided to create a thread, "Peace-Out Frances" and took all my answers and copied them onto the thread. And then they complained that I just didn't know how to really talk and was from another planet. As far as these yelpers were concered I didn't belong in this generation but I belonged two generations from now, which by this time I would be dead. I put in complaints to the BBB and sent letters and their answer is they don't do any monitoring on the threads and that I should just avoid them.

HAHAHA. I heard YELP was being sued so I thought I search the web to see what it is about. I think they SHOULD be sued for running a SHADY business. I am a salon owner in Vallejo, CA. I was contacted back in early 2008 by a lady, by the the name of Sarah (not sure of the name, I had so many people calling me) harassed me about paying $400 a month to have my business name be priority when customers do a search for salon in the area. I was told "discretely" that the positive reviews will appear ALL at the top. I told them I would think about it. I'm just a small time operator and that $400 is a lot of money to pay every month and I don't want to be in a long term contract. I had to sign a 12 month contract at this price. She then told me she can ask her boss to reduce the contract term to 6 months and the price would be ONLY $500 a month. I told her I would think about it. A few days later I went on yelp to check out my review, I was like WOW, the two negative comments was pushed towards the bottom of the list. And the third that appeared that same week was also at the bottom of the list. What made me think REALLY hard was, where did this 3rd negative review came from and who is this person. In my mind, this so called 3rd negative review was make belief. (We didn't do any hair color service that day????)So to make a long story short, I was given a call literally once a week, and each time I told her I would think about it. I did thought about signing up at one point but I thought I just wait out a little bit to see if there was an increase in new customers because of the yelp rating. Six months had gone by, I finally said NO I cannot afford it.......GUESS WHAT HAPPENED??? ALL the negative reviews APPEARED at the very top of my list. If anyone needs help with there lawsuit to sue YELP. I am willing to help. I think they NEED to change the way they do business.

Funny… Yelp is getting bad reviews all over the world.

Their advertising offers are also can be seen as an upfront uninformed or fraud. I was offered 700 impressions per month for my business on Yelp. But according to Google search data, there is only 400 total monthly searches for my key words. I asked the sales person, how can they provide me with more views then total amount of searches and he said that people who are looking for related services will also see my ad. Silly…. Ha?