No reviews were deleted or otherwise manipulated. So if a business became a Yelp advertiser, the review order would change, but only with that one review that was moved to the very top. This was especially effective for completing a sale if there was a negative review on top ("the first review your customers see will always be a positive one"). One of the key points of the sales pitch involved moving a positive review to the top of the review order where a positive review would stay for the duration of the contract. With the frequently repeated story of business owners being told that their negative reviews will be removed, I believe it comes down to a misunderstanding of the sales pitch (the majority of the time). Why isn't Yelp more transparent about this process and their algorithm? For the same reason Google isn't transparent about their algorithm - to prevent gaming the system. This happens to both positive and negative reviews there is no scam going on here to hide negative reviews for businesses that pay and positive reviews for businesses that don't. While it was a (sometimes extremely) frustrating process, I feel it speaks to how the executives of Yelp really do believe in the integrity of their review guidelines.Īs for reviews being deleted, I can tell you that in many of those instances, the review has been put in a "purgatory" where the system waits until it receives a signal that the review is not actually spam to let it surface back up to users. Theoretically, an Account executive could make friends with a customer service rep or someone on the development team and try to persuade them to remove a review, but this is highly unlikely because if found out, everyone involved would be fired (so there's a huge risk) and I can tell you from personal experience, removing a few reviews is not going to make or break a sale (so it's not worth the risk). And I can tell you that many times it wasn't easy customer service had strict guidelines to follow and I (and my friends) had plenty of arguments that went nowhere. When I was there, the only way for an Account Executive to have a review removed was to email customer service and provide a solid explanation as to why it violated the review guidelines. It was a short stint (November 07 to March 08) because I wasn't very good at the job as I hated the work (though the company itself is fantastic) and didn't believe in the product we were selling.Īccount Executives (and pretty sure everyone in the sales division all the way up to the VP of Sales) had no direct way of removing reviews (and I strongly believe this has not changed). I have both positive and negative feelings about Yelp. I am a former Yelp Account Executive I was one of the people that would call these businesses.
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