The review violated Yelp's Content Guidelines, which are pretty straightforward."Great service!" really isn't helping anyone. Reviews that are too short also get filtered. Other Yelp reviewers can mark a review as funny or useful. I guess Yelp assumes you can't enjoy every experience. This also goes for reviewers who only post positive reviews everywhere they go. The review is too positive or too negative.Yelp doesn't trust users who have only written a few reviews, especially if they have no Yelp friends or profile information.Isn't the Internet fun?Īnyway, here are some common reasons why reviews get filtered: And while many of the fake reviews she paid for didn't make it past Yelp's filter, others did. She then paid for social media followers and reviews, in order to make her phony business to appear to be real.Įven Yelp, with all its suspicion and scrutiny, allowed her to set up a business listing after verifying the "real existence" of her fake business. She created local business listings for a fake karaoke company. Kashmir Hill, an editor at Fusion, decided to try an experiment to see if she could trick the Internet. It's especially annoying to think that, while your legitimate client reviews are being filtered by Yelp, fake reviews, or even an entirely fake business, can still appear on Yelp. When real reviews get filtered, it's frustrating. Businesses can even see a 5% to 9% increase in revenue if their Yelp rating increases by one star (and all those five-star reviews that are being filtered out also don't count toward your star rating). 79% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. Positive Yelp reviews can impact small businesses in a huge way. This is an issue for business owners, who need the feedback (both positive and negative) from their actual customers. Because the filter is automated, sometimes even authentic reviews get filtered. The filter is intended to protect businesses.īut there's a problem with this. The purpose of the filter is to remove fake or illegitimate reviews.
Yelp uses an automated filter to hide certain reviews in order to display only the most helpful and honest reviews. What is the Yelp filter and why should I care? In this post we'll tell you why Yelp sometimes filters legitimate reviews and give you some tips for improving the chances that your reviews stay recommended. In the words of Brian Fantana, "60% of the time it works.every time." And with the importance of online reviews, nothing is more frustrating than when Yelp filters a perfectly legitimate review into the dreaded "not recommended" section. Yelp trusts consumers to leave authentic reviews about their experiences. Yelp lets consumers (Yelpers) be the jury. Yelp's purpose is to help people find great local businesses, but who (or what) decides if a business is great? Yet, despite its growing popularity, Yelp has been a thorn in the side of many small business owners. In 2015, Yelp's average monthly mobile unique visitors swelled to 89 million.