Yelp’s Review Policies Are Unfair To Paid Advertisers

Recently, several satisfied customers posted favorable reviews on our portal page with Yelp, but it was brought to my attention that Yelp is not going to post those reviews because they claim we coerced or asked the customer to post them. Nothing could be further from the truth and in my humble opinion, this is one the most unfair review policies in existence today.

I mean, just think about the whole concept of reviews anyway? Most companies are only going to post the good ones and hopefully, there is no hidden agenda from Yelp to use the bad ones as ammunition to control the advertising success of their paying advertisers by controlling which reviews potential customers get a chance to see. I have used other online advertising portals such as Google, YP and Angie’s List , however, none of them harp on the reviewer’s comments more than Yelp.

With Yelp’s review policy, they use a software system that analyzes each review in several areas to find out if the reviewer was asked by the advertiser to say something nice or just post a review. Yelp has decided not to “recommend or show several of my five-star reviews on my advertising page because they are claiming that I actually asked each customer to post a good review about the service they received, when each one of the customers that posted a review on us did so on their own accord. These reviews scenarios and differences seem like simple things that two willing parties can work out amongst themselves if Yelp would allow it, however, this appears to be Yelp’s claim to fame because they are the only company that uses bad or good reviews to control which of their paid advertisers get the new customers.

There was also an instance where a satisfied customer posted a disingenuous review and she just wanted to change her comments or even take them down after I replied to the post, but Yelp would not allow her to do it. Yelp doesn’t appear to care if untrue things are said about one of their advertisers in a review that actually hurts that advertiser’s business. After having several conversations with their “Lack of Customer Service Department,” I just decided not to pay to advertise on Yelp any longer because of their unrealistic policies regarding the reviews that are posted about their advertisers.

Low and behold, I have gotten several calls from Yelp asking me to restart my advertising campaign when no one there is willing to even discuss their outdated review policy. As a paid advertiser, I only wanted a chance to show the reviews that described our company in a good way and I have noticed a decline in the amount of new customers since the bad review was posted. My next move will be to post an unfavorable, but honest review on Google about my experience with Yelp.

Google is actually much better than Yelp because they have a realistic policy regarding reviews. In fact, Google encourages it’s advertisers to ask for reviews from each customer and this is something that is totally different from Yelp. Yelp could treat its advertisers much better by explaining their review policy before the advertiser signs up and takes reviews from a mutual client.