Is Yelp.com a Scam?

If you don't know what the website Yelp is, you may be living under a rock. If you Google any restaurant, store, or hotel in your area, that place's Yelp page will most likely be listed on the results page. Yelp is pretty much a genius idea. As a country with economical problems, we still like to spend money. However, with financial stress upon us, we want to spend our money wisely and avoid places with bad food and or bad service. That's where Yelp comes in. With tens of thousands of businesses listed, anyone can find exactly what they're looking for and read the reviews for that business. Yelp is useful in the sense that individuals submit their honest reviews, as opposed to food critics or secret shoppers. And depending on the popularity, a single business can easily have over 1,000 reviews. The fact that Yelp.com rakes in around 30,000,000 views a month and is the 48th most popular website in the U.S. only adds to the genius of it. But is Yelp really what it seems?

I joined Yelp back in July of 2008 after relying on the site numerous times to get opinions on some local businesses I wanted to visit. I joined because I wanted to write reviews of some of my favorite places and some places I had issues with. Overall, I really enjoyed writing for Yelp because I felt like my reviews could potentially be helpful to people. I continued to write since summer of 2008 and enjoyed it until a recent incident occurred. I found a local and popular restaurant on Yelp and decided to try it out. My friends and I ventured to the location in Chicago and ended up having a fabulous meal. As we were finishing up our meals, the manager came by and asked us how our food was. We raved about it for a few moments and then I chimed in that I had found the restaurant on Yelp. As soon as I said it, the manager seemed to be taken aback. When I inquired about his response to my comment, he proceeded to tell me the restaurant had issues with Yelp, specifically that Yelp had contacted the owner and offered a sponsored position on the site for around $700 a month. The manager told me the restaurant owner declined the offer, but a few weeks later their Yelp page took a turn. Negative reviews started showing up towards the top of the page whereas before they were eventually distributed amongst the pages of other reviews.

That night I decided to do some research. If this restaurant had issues with Yelp, I figured there would surely be others. After a bit of digging, I had found numerous accounts of business owners who had experienced "extortion-like" business practices from Yelp. Many of the claims all seemed to have things common, mostly that a representative from Yelp contacted the business offering to give them a sponsored position on the site (which involves listing the business first among other competitors) if the business paid Yelp several hundred dollars a month. Many businesses declined and thought it ended there. However, a few weeks later the business would check their Yelp page and would see several changes. While their total number of reviews increased, a large portion of those reviews would be negative and also be from members who had only written one or two reviews before. Aside from that, many of these short and negative reviews appeared on the top of their Yelp page whereas they had been mixed with the other reviews. Some business owners who experienced this, including one San Francisco-based furniture restoration business, said that Yelp's extortion-like practices severely hurt their business.

I decided to do some research on Yelp's website to see if this was true. I saw that some popular restaurants and other businesses had a large number of negative reviews showing up at the top of their Yelp page, including the restaurant in Chicago that I had visited. I didn't notice it before because I tend to sore the reviews by rating, reading the positive reviews first and then the negative reviews.

Additionally, I noticed a feature on the site that I hadn't seen before. At the bottom of the review pages there is a "Filtered Reviews" section. It's carefully hidden and unless you venture down to the bottom of the page it's very easy to miss. I went to the "Filtered Reviews" section, which requires that you verify you're human by typing in jumbled code on a colored picture, and began looking through the reviews. On some of the review pages many of the reviews are negative, while some have only filtered positive reviews. Could this be another Yelp "extortion" tactic? To filter reviews seemed odd, especially since some of the filtered reviews were from established Yelp members. I decided to investigate a little further, specifically into what constituted a filtered review. As I should have expected, Yelp is extremely vague on their methods of filtering reviews. They claim they need to be vague in order to prevent scrupulous individuals from getting around the system. This would seem fair, but the claims against Yelp already seemed to make sense and this filtering system seemed almost like a way for them to cover their butts.

The main issue with Yelp doing this is that it can definitely hurt businesses. It's very rare that you'll find a chain restaurant or business on Yelp, which means most of their listings are local and home-grown businesses who rely on the word of mouth to bring in revenue. A large percentage of negative reviews can easily hurt a business, even if those negative reviews are generated by actual users or just Yelp itself. Either way Yelp can easily put small businesses in the palm of their cyber hand. But is their light at the end of the tunnel?

Overall, it seems as though the claims and evidence against Yelp is piling up rapidly. And while many people still use Yelp, it's important to take it with a grain of salt and know that there are some controversies behind the site.