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I posted a negative review about one of Yelp’s “top local businesses”. Two things happened, my review was filtered out almost immediately and the steady stream of promotional emails from the business that I reviewed stopped. No more emails is fine with me, but is that a coincidence? I’m guessing that the reviews are sent to the business that was reviewed, but then who decides what gets filtered? Is that Yelp’s “automated filtering process”? There seem to be just enough negative reviews so it looks real, but they are so situational that most people will discount them.
Are there any local review sites that are actually impartial?
It might not have been [the content of] your review. It might have been your email address or the domain or something else. I write that because the spam stopped for you too - they could have simply purged you from their system.
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.
I wrote many reviews on Yelp, some of them are not to flattering and all are still there.
Maybe the issue was not what was written, but how it was written?
Yelp has a filter that they don't disclose how it works for obvious reasons. It is designed to filter out fake positive and negative reviews. If you were over the top positive or negative it probably got filtered. I rarely get filtered and write both positive and negative reviews. My strategy to not get filtered is to use proper grammar and not excessively use exclamation points or capital letters. Just write a well written and thought out review that is somewhat coherent and grammatically correct.
Yelp deleted a review that I wrote which had been on there for a very long time. They notified me that my review was deleted because I had not ever been to the restaurant I was reviewing.
Well, yeah......I had been there more than once and quite recently before writing the review.
Yelp is a garbage website, sculpted by it's webmasters to manipulate consumer response.
I’d used the website of the company that I’d reviewed very recently to schedule my appointment, so I doubt they simply purged my e-mail address (as an unused account). Also, I didn‘t think it would be worthwhile to complain to the company directly (there is no way that I would ever go back) so the only way they could have known that I was dissatisfied was through the Yelp review.
I don’t really see anything in my review that would justify filtering it. I didn’t use extreme language or all caps or anything like that. Just explained specifically why I was dissatisfied with the service that I received. I see other filtered reviews for the same company that also seem perfectly reasonable.
Also, what is the rationale for making it so difficult to see the filtered reviews with the extra-strength captcha on the desktop version of Yelp? I haven’t figured out how to see the filtered reviews at all on the mobile version of Yelp. Something not right about that.
I write reviews on it- positive and negative- and they're all still there.
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