Is Yelp fake? Are there any real local review sites?

[Audioque]

My extremely negative review had remained on the site up until I closed my account some times last year. But the rating remained. I had never been filtered out before.

[fallingwater]

I wrote both positive and negative reviews of places and they all stayed for almost a year, then one day I logged on to give another review of a business and all my reviews were gone.

[elnina]

I wonder how their filtering system works. Did they ( similar to C-D ) put a list of words that are the triggers?
Since some of our reviews were deleted and other not, maybe they contained those words?

[Thepastpresentandfuture]

Well, Yelp does technically have a connection to Shopping Consumer Products for being a website where people write reviews about local places that sell varied products to their customers.

Most people never encounter that on Yelp and there is a lot of honest reviews there, including negative reviews. However, most of the posts that don’t get edited or deleted are not personal. I am sure Yelp has some rules about not allowing direct negative personal posts and anything that is overly off topic.

Yelp is an impartial website that is not fake and people are able to see honest reviews over there too, including for local shopping consumer products.

While I have 3,705 posts on CD the past 3 years, I only have 7 posts in the past 2 months on Yelp.

I overall view CD: city-data to be the better and more exciting website than Yelp, but I also like and respect Yelp too, just not nearly as much as CD that is my all time favorite website.

[persnicketygal]

Yelp's competition -- Google, Twitter, Facebook.

Yelp's captures are a PITA for me, too. It takes at least 2 "try anothers" for me to make some of the characters out. And the filtered reviews don't look any different than the others -- there's nothing about them that makes them suspicious in any way, at least the ones I've seen.

[Pamina333]

Was dismayed to learn that busineses who get a lot of feedback. especially positive, are contacted by YELP to buy subscriptions. One such professional's positive reviews were deleted, due to not subscribing. A colleague of said professional who also gets consistent positive reviews will NOT take calls from YELP asking her to subscribe, afraid if she declines (which she most certainly would), her positives will disappear as her colleague's had.

That would certainly explain this -- check out the "ad" of a business with 4th street in its addy. You have all probably seen similar ads when searching for reviews on there.

Cosmetic dentistry nyc New York, NY

Of course I was crushed to learn this, as YELP has been invaluable

The subscription pressure is most likely why certain reviews stay, or disappear.]

EDIT: Yup! (Answered OP before reading subsequent posts.)

Originally Posted by what???

Yes, I have heard from multiple "techie" friends that Yelp is fake. Supposedly Yelp demands a fee from companies who are reviewed on their site. If the companies do not pay, Yelp filters out the good reviews. If the comapanies pay, the negative reviews are filtered out. I typically use Yelp and then just do a Google search of the product/restaurant/company I'm thinking of buying/visiting to get a more balanced view.

[moved]

Originally Posted by Hollytree

I write reviews on it- positive and negative- and they're all still there.

I do the same thing, and mine are still there, too.