Yelp! review filtering

[brycen]

I'm helping a business that has (had) two (2) Yelp reviews.

Yelp's algorithm just marked them as 'not recommended', effectively deep sixing them, and turning a 4.5 star business into a 0 star business.

Both reviews match up with a real customer of the business, and describe events and jobs business owner remembers (the jobs are tens of thousands of dollars each).

What, if anything, can be done to restore these? Is there any appeal process?

[martinibuster]

Why do you think they were flagged? Were the reviews posted on the same day or within days of each other? Were the reviews posted from the same IP addy? Were the IP addys local or non-local?

[brycen]

The reviews were posted by the clients weeks apart, presumably at their own computers on their own time.

The reviews went away after I set up the new biz account. During that session I was at my own computer, thus logged into my personal yelp account. I switched to set up the client's biz account, then switched back and forth between biz and personal several times (Yelp makes switching easy). I marked the reviews as "helpful" from one or more sides. The reviews went away a few days later, coincident with running out of Yelp ad credit.

Yelp likely triggered off the common IP address. But is there a fix or reconsideration process?

[PetPampa]

Where they added by the 'claimed' owner of the business?

Yes they may be real reviews but if the owner has added them on behalf of the clients it may not appear natural in yelps eyes...

It may be worth submitting a support ticket regarding the issue,

I had a friend who had a similar problem - when they created a Yelp profile they told there customers - new and old to leave there reviews (they own a building company)

The problem being that they gained 5-10 reviews with a week and then nothing for a few weeks and then nothing again for a month.

It can appear unatural and can cause a flag to be raised

Hope it gets sorted...

[Selen]

Yelp's algorithm

I find this algorithm pretty much useless (still don't understand why Yelp is shooting themselves in the foot by hiding reviews; it's bad for usability and bad from SEO perspective). All it takes to hide a bad (or good in this case) review is to report it (and be consistent in reporting it if needed). I've seen a dozen of useful bad reviews made naturally during different months/years and all of them were hidden (despite the fact this business only had a couple of positive reviews - also hidden). Or reviews that were considered useful by the algorithm until it was reported - then it was apparently useless.

[Planet13]

Don't get me started...

We have three brick and mortar locations.

One of our locations has about 25 reviews. 15 of them (almost all of them overwhelmingly positive) are filtered out by yelp.

When I look at the filtered reviews, I can recognize the customers from their yelp profile photos. I mean, these are customers who come in and shop a couple of times a year with us.

Yeah, some of them we asked / begged them to yelp for us, but the others just did it on their own.

Some of the people who have filtered reviews are pretty regular yelpers with lots of friends (or whatever they call them), some aren't.

All I can say is to just keep asking people who like your business to keep yelping for you but to not expect it to really do anything for you.