Yelp Review From My Customer Removed
-
Hi,
A customer of mine told me she created a yelp account just to give me a review. She's a good customer and wanted to show me her appreciation. I thanked her for taking the trouble. About a week later, I see that her review was marked as "not recommended." This was a legitimate review made by a real customer. I'm angry that it was removed for no reason. I noticed a competitor of mine has 18 yelp reviews and all of them show up just fine. I also noticed that this same competitor is paying for ads from Yelp. A couple of years ago, another customer reviewed me on yelp and it was also labeled as "not recommended." So I now have 2 "not recommended" reviews on Yelp that, if you ask me, imply that my reviews are fake. After Yelp and Yahoo merged, I lost the 14 Yahoo reviews I had obtained from customers over the last six years. I have also noticed over the years, that whenever I need to sign into my Yelp business account to update the data, it's locked until some pushy sales person calls and asks to speak to me in order to try to sell me ads on Yelp. Anyone else hate Yelp? They're obviously not really interested in making sure reviews are "real," they're just interested in selling expensive ads.
-
I didn't ask my customer for a review. She was so happy with our service that she did this on her own and then told me about it. That's how I know it was placed in the filtered area on Yelp. I don't bother with Yelp at all.
-
Thanks for the response. I agree with you. The only bad thing is that I had 14 Yahoo reviews for my business that took years to acquire from customers. They all disappeared when Yelp took over for Yahoo. I now have 1 Yelp review and 3 they call "not recommended." I'm actually showing up lower on the local Yahoo map because I have 1 review now instead of 14. When I told my customer what Yelp did, she was nice enough to go to Google to leave the review.
-
We have been round and round with this as well. Most likely it is from the user having just created an account, and with no other activity left a good review for your business. When we have people leave reviews for clients on Yelp, we always ask that they go out and leave a few for places they like before leaving a review. This helps the account to be seen as more "realistic".
I remember a case where companies began suing people that left reviews.
And I'll just leave this here:
Link"John may sound paranoid, but he's got company. During interviews with dozens of business owners over a span of several months, six people told this newspaper that Yelp sales representatives promised to move or remove negative reviews if their business would advertise. In another six instances, positive reviews disappeared — or negative ones appeared — after owners declined to advertise."
In my opinion, get people to leave reviews for your business on Google places. Yelp's review system and business practices seem to be driven more towards monetary gain.
*edit BTW, I would not advertise on Yelp. We have tried it many times, using different techniques and it never pays for itself. The truth about Yelp ads is: unless people are seaching on Yelp for your services, they won't find you. It's true that your Yelp profile might come up in organic Google search results, but paying for ads on Yelp wont help that any. Most are going to search on Google, and I would dedicate my focus to improving your position in those results.
-
Here is a good piece that will shine some light on your trouble.
http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2013/01/yelps-rocky-relationship-with-small-business029/
-
Yelp does state in several places for businesses to not ask customers to review their site, such as https://biz.yelp.com/support/review_solicitation.
-
More than likely the reason it was removed is that it was considered spam. One way that Yelp detects spam is from new accounts that open and leave one review to never be logged into again. I went round and round with this, because /i actually ran a promotion where /i gave people a discount to leave a review. It was basically wasted money.
-
We work very closely with our customers, and reviews are a huge part of our strategy. We list all of the places customers can review us here. Yelp is the bain of review strategies. They are regarded as the most legitimate review company, but they also make it harder to leave reviews than any other site. Then, after all that, they call you and offer you advertising so that you can get more reviews that will be flagged by their spam filter. I do truly believe that they have de-coupled reviews from their ad sales, just as they claim they do, but I've also never seen a more aggressive ad sales team than Yelp, and it creates a huge amount of suspicion for those who aren't sure what Yelp is all about.
Anyhow, there are a few ways to get reviews to stick. We actually ask our users not to post on our Yelp page anymore unless they specifically tell us they have a Yelp account in good standing whose reviews stick. As you can see, that's very few people. Our page has 2 reviews (just as a point of fact, the 1-star review you see filtered was left by one of our competitors and we were very glad it got filtered, though it is upsetting that Yelp shows the negative reviews first in filtered section. That said, we have just as few Angie's List reviews, and the only reason it's less upsetting is because Angie's List is a bit of a walled garden. So, our expectation is that it's hard to get a review there. Just like Yelp, we only ask for an Angie's List review if someone indicates that they have an account on Angie's List. We also run the check against Angie's List accounts from time to time. The other, kind of odd strategy, that I have employed in the past for customers whom have a very good relationship with us, is I send them an email every 2 months asking them to basically use their Yelp account. Yelp's review filter works until Yelp decides the account as legitimate. This is done a lot of ways, but mainly, you need to convince the person to use the account. When I was doing agency, I had good results with that strategy.
-
Thanks for the response. There are naturally going to be more new people creating Yelp accounts when they try to review a business they find on Yahoo as the two have merged. I really think if you pay Yelp for ads they will let your reviews stay. They are corrupt in my opinion. I'll encourage anyone who tells me they want to leave me a review not to do so at Yahoo or Yelp. It's always about the money. As I said earlier, my competitor has 18 Yelp reviews, in our very small town, and none of them have been labeled "not recommended." I also notice he pays them for ads.
-
It could be that it was flagged as fishy, since the person created an account and left just one positive review.
I've seen complaints about how Yelp filters reviews from new accounts, and how it may more heavily impact companies where it's a one-time service with large fees. I'm thinking specifically a complaint someone had that a moving company had a bunch of poor reviews that were filtered. The reviews were left by people that were so frustrated with this company they created a Yelp account solely to warn other people (because this was a high-dollar purchase, unlike just a meal out at a restaurant), they were legitimate reviews, but looked suspicious to Yelp's algorithms.
No solution for you here, but a possible explanation.
-
Thanks for the link but there wasn't anything over there about Yelp removing legitimate, positive reviews.
-
There are several questions about Yelp removing reviews in Moz Q&A. Here is a recent one with lots of background information.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How many reviews should i have previewed for marking up a page?
I have a separate /reviews URL, but want to markup the main page with aggregate reviews and also add preview reviews on there. Roughly, how many reviews do I need on the page in order to markup with aggregate review?
Reviews and Ratings | | imjonny1230 -
Business name change - Impact on reviews?
Hi I have a client who has created multiple GMB listings for his business using the same address, post code and phone number and I am trying to sort it all out. 2 of the listings have 1 review and 1 of them has 13 reviews. Obviously i want to keep the listing that has 13 reviews and delete the other 2. Keeping the listing with 13 reviews means I will have to update the business name in Google my business because it was originally entered wrongly. Will the profile need to be verified again? Will my client be able to keep those reviews or will they be deleted? Thanks
Reviews and Ratings | | coolhandluc1 -
Google crawling item page reviews
Hi Moz community, I've been trying to do some on-site work and noticed that our product pages reviews may not be totally optimized. It used to be that all of the text from the reviews appeared in the actual code of the page, but now none of that text appears, so it may not be getting crawled. The change was most likely released when we had an item page redesign. However, when I Google a review snippet, it does seem to come up, so maybe Google is crawling that data despite it not being SEO optimized. Is this really an issue if the review snippets are showing up in search, there's been a lot of talk that Google is now better at crawling javascript. Thanks
Reviews and Ratings | | znotes0 -
How to address reviews that show up in Google but come from a business's own website?
One of my clients has a competitor who has a fairly poor reputation based on reviews on Google and Yelp. But, this competitor allows people to review them on their own website, and their "4.8" rating based on 250+ "reviews" show up in search engine results. I assume they are using schema markup to encourage that. My question is whether there is anything we can do to report this to Google, or otherwise make sure the general public is not fooled by these reviews?
Reviews and Ratings | | irapasternack2 -
SEO Friendly Review websites?
What are some SEO friendly online review websites? I remember Google Reviews used to show up high in the rankings but i'm not sure what the best place to direct customers to write reviews? Yelp is strong on Bing and Yahoo...but what's good on Google?
Reviews and Ratings | | Souk0 -
Bing Local Lists Yelp Reviews From Another Business At Shared Address
Hi everyone, I am having a problem with Bing local listings and am hoping someone might be able to help me out. Basically I am working with a business that shares an address with another (separate legal entities, different owners, different phone, different domain). Both are bathroom remodelers, but one uses the space as a storefront/showroom, the other is strictly a service area business and uses the space for storage/office space (this is the one I am working with). I have claimed their listing on bing local and set it to hide the address. The problem I am having is that for whatever reason, Bing local is associating the yelp page of business 1 (showroom) with business 2 (business 2 is not currently on yelp). My question: what options do I have to remedy this? Is there a way to request a manual review of sorts to have this fixed? Would it be sufficient to create/verify a yelp page for business 2 and hope that Bing picks up on this?
Reviews and Ratings | | rbmac0 -
Best E-Mail Service For Customer Reviews
Hello Moz Community, I manage an online wallpaper store. The site is totalwallovering.com We already have a 5 star review form in place on all product pages with rich snippets. I want to set up my own system for e-mailing customers two weeks after they purchase wallpaper from us, in effect asking them leave us a review of the product. Most people are generally willing to do so if they get a reminder. So far in the past 6 months since we have added the review form we have gotten eight reviews. I got a call from Trustpilot last week and I really liked their system ALOT but I am unwilling to pay $600/month. I would rather have all of my reviews on my own website. I literally have thousands of past customers and would like to bulk upload them into the system so that I can generate hundreds of reviews quickly but if that is not possible I can just start with the customers I get today. I am open to any suggestions. Thanks
Reviews and Ratings | | Wesley-Barras0 -
How to Google Product Reviews?
Hello, I have a client that sells only 1 item. What will be the best way to start getting reviews? I thought about opening a placess account, so the reviews will also start showing on his Adwords campaign. Or can I get products reviews on google+ ? Thanks
Reviews and Ratings | | ogdcorp0