I’m a writer. So when I am moved to compose anything, I put a lot of thought into it. I could also be long-winded and take 500 words to convey a sentiment others sum up more tersely in 50 — but I love ideas and I love words. I also pride myself on making the effort to offer viewers something they have not read before — a fresh and original angle to stimulate thinking. So when my 500 word review ended up in Yelp’s filter, I was deeply disturbed. Algorithms make mistakes all the time; in fact, mistakes are an inherent by-product of algorithms. They are actuarial in nature, which is to say they take a probabalistic approach to filtering out reviews based on the appearance of a word you would expect to find in an undesirable review (i.e., malicious / shill) but which any Yelp executive knows also appears in reviews that are not written by malicious defamers or shills. Yelp knows good reviews are caught in its wide net so what is deeply disturbing is that it does not seem to care about your time, effort, and opinion nor does it care the quality of its collection is being compromised. It just plays a numbers game and figures it will all wash out over a number of reviews. With so many reviews, you can rest assured some will be good — some bad — and who cares whether the star count is accurate as long as Yelp managed to trick the community into thinking it is credible and scientific.

What this means is that you and I as individual reviewers are just livestock to Yelp. It is not about building a good library of reviews nor is it about the individual reviewer nor about the product / service under review. It’s all just to prop up Yelp. I know this as a statistician who has worked in business. Believe me — Yelp knows what it’s doing. No one in their executive offices could be so stupid as to have never learned the lessons we have all learned over the years about trusting everything to technology or to a set of rules. These lessons are embodied in decades of film-making and centuries of literature — not to mention real world history. And yet Yelp is greedily — again, not stupidly — turning out a technological device that blindly and indiscriminantly applies a set of rules to your thoughts and feelings and rejects them without regard to their intrinsic worth.

Yelp aspires to become the Google of Reviews by wrapping itself in the symbols of technology and professionalism. Ironically it is creating the most untrustworthy of review sites.

Point blank, if your are a NEW business…… you stand very very little opportunity of gaining any traction or benefit from a Yelp listing. Primarily because it’ll be almost impossible for your to obtain any reviews.

For the most part because most Yelpers are a loyal crowd…. almost cult like. So if your business listing on Yelp doesn’t have any reviews….. you’re pretty much NOT going to get any “their” business.

And ofcourse, since it’s only die-hard seasoned Yelpers reviews which are NOT getting filtered…..it does your business listing NO good for any of your clients sign up for a yelp account and post a review for you… because it WILL get filtered.

Yelp meanwhile realizes this…… and is making a TON of money off of unsuspecting businesses wanting to get in on the band wagon…… Yelp AGGRESSIVELY sells them their “pay up front” advertising packages to anyone and everyone they can…. to a tune of MILLIONS of dollars per month.

The reality is that most all of these “new” advertisers get taken for every penny with NO new business to show for their investment….. remember they have NO reviews on their listings….and most likely won’t ever be able to get any from those seasoned yelpers whos reviews don’t get filtered.

If you’re a new business……. don’t even waste your time with Yelp…… and certainly do NOT give them any of your hard earned money.

A way to get around them is to actually post your reviews on Google (Google business name and then click on “Place page”)

It’s a matter of time before Yelp will become obsolete and a better site is available to post legitimate reviews without some idiotic system filtering them out.

Hi David,

It looks like your reviews are legitimately filtered.

Neither Tim M. nor Sarah M. quite pass the sniff test.

Instead of trying to game the system I would recommend making a customer service check-up part of your service. If they’re not feeling 5 stars when you’re ready to leave, fix that problem and when they feel like you’ve done all you can to satisfy then ask for a review.

Keep in mind, Yelp has some of the most stringent guidelines and they do their best to assure real reviews. That said, it’s their party.

One bit of good news is that your business is misidentified as being in San Francisco. It’s a good way to argue for pulling the reviews. Claim your listing, change your address and then put in a request to have the original review pulled.

Will