SmallBusinessNewz

 I knew a business in San Francisco had to pay a few thousand dollars to get ride of bad reviews. The owner first found some bad reviews that has no ground. So some good customers wrote some good reviews but soon not shown up there but the bad reviews kept showing up. All of a sudden, there were a few cancel orders (said due to the bad reviews). The owner panic and agreed to pay the company to put ad into Yelp and  remove the bad reviews.

I think the idea of these review type sites is great. In actual practice though, I think they fall short. My guess is that the majority of reviews will be negative because that's almost the only time someone is going to take the time to register, fill out the form, etc. As far as the extortion - I doubt that's their business model but when you have people on a performance based pay system and they can turn the screws to get a commission - they are going to do it. I hope they fix the system because as a consumer I enjoy having reviews to warn you from corrupt/irresponsible businesses. That being said the current systems is more about finding who has the least number of complaints. Just my opinion.

 We have a predominate salon in Los Angeles for the past 10 years and have been written up in over 60 magazines worldwide for being the “best of” and are on countless TV shows.   We did not know what Yelp was until 2009 nor did we care. When we looked at Yelp and noted many good reviews. Then we started getting calls to “sponsor”- a sponsor is when you willingly give money to sponsor an event or charity. Lets use the real term when it pertains to Yelp- "pay to play buy having your name come up first on the search site". We declined because in the past 9 years there has been no need to advertise on a search engine like Yelp to get our business. Then shortly after the decline a horrible review came on, then another two. We knew something was odd because the review referenced having their hair done by the owner during a time when the owner was out of the country filming. And one review that personally attacked the owner for his conduct outside of the business while he was working out at his gym.   I contacted Yelp to have the reviews removed based on the reviewer's violation of the Yelp's Terms of Conduct and reviewers numerous unfounded accusations and inaccurate statements.  The reviews were removed.  However, shortly after that another review came up that stated “several years ago I got my hair done at…”  Most all of our good reviews were gone and only 3 remain. So, we “sponsored” or should I say payed the extortionist for 3 months, good reviews returned however no increase in revenue from Yelpers patronizing the business. Then as any smart business owner seeing no increased revenue we terminated the “sponsorship”. Just recently there is an update by the bad reviewer stating blatant lies & last week a scathing 5k plus review.  Moreover, if you look at the stats on the "business trends page views" it has gone from sponsorship period of 148 clicks to 45 clicks, please note prior to sponsorship we were at 177 clicks per page.  We just find this fishy.   Our City Search is vastly different than Yelp's, although we understand  our business cannot satisfy everyone and there will be disgruntled clients that need to vent, Yelp's conduct is unacceptable.