What Sound Does A Dog Make When You Step On Its Tail?... Yelp!

[Foos56]

A few weeks ago we finally got our first review on Yelp!, and it was Five stars. I was ecstatic. I logged on yesterday to check the site and found this:
"No active reviews for this business (1 filtered review)."

Perplexed, I dug a little deeper. As it turns out that Yelp! has an automatic filter system that tries to eliminate spam and fake reviews. This "system" occasionally snags a real review and filters it. This wouldn't be too big of an issue if I could contact someone about removing the filter, since it is a genuine review. However, Yelp! has decided that customer support isn't important.

In the Frequently Asked Questions, under "Will You Reinstate a Legitimate Review that was Filtered" they say: "Either way, business owners should probably focus less on any one review and more on their entire body of reviews." That's well and fine... IF YOU HAVE MORE THAN JUST ONE REVIEW! But when you are just starting out on a site, this is extremely inconvenient.

So I pose this question to you all: Do you use Yelp! day-to-day, or have you ever even heard of the website? Is it still worth maintaining our place on Yelp? Has anyone encountered similar problems elsewhere on other sites that host reviews, like Google Places or Dealer Rater?

 

[yagoparamo]

A few weeks ago we finally got our first review on Yelp!, and it was Five stars. I was ecstatic. I logged on yesterday to check the site and found this:
"No active reviews for this business (1 filtered review)."

Perplexed, I dug a little deeper. As it turns out that Yelp! has an automatic filter system that tries to eliminate spam and fake reviews. This "system" occasionally snags a real review and filters it. This wouldn't be too big of an issue if I could contact someone about removing the filter, since it is a genuine review. However, Yelp! has decided that customer support isn't important.

In the Frequently Asked Questions, under "Will You Reinstate a Legitimate Review that was Filtered" they say: "Either way, business owners should probably focus less on any one review and more on their entire body of reviews." That's well and fine... IF YOU HAVE MORE THAN JUST ONE REVIEW! But when you are just starting out on a site, this is extremely inconvenient.

So I pose this question to you all: Do you use Yelp! day-to-day, or have you ever even heard of the website? Is it still worth maintaining our place on Yelp? Has anyone encountered similar problems elsewhere on other sites that host reviews, like Google Places or Dealer Rater?

It will be good to know if when you get multiple good reviews that are filtered Yelp will go and un-filter those as a group; or if and when Yelp will consider an account legitimate will go back and un-filter the earlier reviews added from that account.

Has anyone heard about this or experienced this?

 

[ryan.leslie]

Hey Drew,

Great Title!

If you want to build reviews on Yelp you really need to seek out the folks that are Yelpers. From all that I've read, Yelp's algorithm will remove positive reviews if they only review one business. The best strategy might be to ask that happy customer if they are a Yelper, if they look at you like you have 3 heads you'll know the answer, just have a witty one-liner ready to diffuse the awkward silence that is sure to follow.

Places pages have a terms of use they clearly aren't enforcing at this time. I sincerely doubt you'll see any reviews disappear from your place page, positive or negative.

I'm more than qualified to answer your questions about DealerRater. Our Terms of Use is strictly enforced so you'll want to familiarize your team with it. The highlights are; No reviews from employees or family of employees, No reviews written from within the store, No "marketing agencies" loading reviews on behalf of your customers. If your customers are writing reviews from anywhere but your brick and mortar and they verify their email by clicking on the cursory link the review will post.

Hope that helps you and best of luck. I'm happy to answer any questions you may have and I promise you won't get a sales pitch. Please do feel free to call or email me.

Ryan

 

[Foos56]

Awesome responses guys! I appreciate it. Your information is quite informative. While it is still a little frustrating to have a review filtered, you both have made me see why this has happened. I guess I'll simply have to get more Yelpers!

@Ryan Leslie - Excellent. I'll take you up on your offer once I get some time here at the office. Takes a lot of work to turn an offline dealership into an online dealership.

 

[yagoparamo]

Hey Drew,

Great Title!

If you want to build reviews on Yelp you really need to seek out the folks that are Yelpers. From all that I've read, Yelp's algorithm will remove positive reviews if they only review one business. The best strategy might be to ask that happy customer if they are a Yelper, if they look at you like you have 3 heads you'll know the answer, just have a witty one-liner ready to diffuse the awkward silence that is sure to follow.

Places pages have a terms of use they clearly aren't enforcing at this time. I sincerely doubt you'll see any reviews disappear from your place page, positive or negative.

I'm more than qualified to answer your questions about DealerRater. Our Terms of Use is strictly enforced so you'll want to familiarize your team with it. The highlights are; No reviews from employees or family of employees, No reviews written from within the store, No "marketing agencies" loading reviews on behalf of your customers. If your customers are writing reviews from anywhere but your brick and mortar and they verify their email by clicking on the cursory link the review will post.

Hope that helps you and best of luck. I'm happy to answer any questions you may have and I promise you won't get a sales pitch. Please do feel free to call or email me.

Ryan

Ryan,

WARNING-THIS-IS-NOT-NEGATIVE

I have a pretty good Yelp account that I use to test how things work so I review lots of things, have followers, follow people, out photos, do check ins, etc, so there is more to the filter than just new accounts.

I did a positive review about the service department at a Ford dealer (and I put photos on my f350) and it got filtered. The dealer has horrible Yelps and lots of them. The only reason why mine got filtered is that someone or some algorithm though it was impossible for this dealer to get positive reviews.

Checking further, this dealer has 60+ reviews filtered with many of them being bad and some being good.

Absolutelly no patytern to whats going on here: Sound Ford - Renton, WA

You can see my review in the filtered ones.

 

[ed.brooks]

Ryan,

WARNING-THIS-IS-NOT-NEGATIVE

I have a pretty good Yelp account that I use to test how things work so I review lots of things, have followers, follow people, out photos, do check ins, etc, so there is more to the filter than just new accounts.

I did a positive review about the service department at a Ford dealer (and I put photos on my f350) and it got filtered. The dealer has horrible Yelps and lots of them. The only reason why mine got filtered is that someone or some algorithm though it was impossible for this dealer to get positive reviews.

Checking further, this dealer has 60+ reviews filtered with many of them being bad and some being good.

Absolutelly no patytern to whats going on here: Sound Ford - Renton, WA

You can see my review in the filtered ones.

Yago, Please note that I'm not trying to be antagonistic here either. It seems like at least as many negative reviews have been filtered for this dealership as positive ones. Is it possible that Yelp noticed how many reviews of car dealerships you've submitted and filtered you for that reason?

 

[yagoparamo]

Yago, Please note that I'm not trying to be antagonistic here either. It seems like at least as many negative reviews have been filtered for this dealership as positive ones. Is it possible that Yelp noticed how many reviews of car dealerships you've submitted and filtered you for that reason?

In my case that could have been the issue but if you look at all their filtered reviews you will see other's that are not the case. To make matters more confusing many of the filtered reviews are negative!

I had dinner with a dealer yesterday that said that Yelp was unwilling to remove a negative review that contained some personal attacks, after the dealer entered their pay program ($315/month for banner ads, etc) they accepted to remove that particular bad review.

As always-he said they did what my friend saw happened-must be taken with a grain of salt.