Do you really believe Yelp does this? Tell me what you think :-)

(Chris Crum @ WebProNews) Once again, Yelp is drawing the kind of media attention that it would like to avoid, but which has been following it around for years. You know the deal. A business claims Yelp is holding positive reviews hostage in its review filter because they refused to pay for ads. We hear this claim time and time again from business after business, and it can't be good for Yelp's reputation.

This time, a reddit post to the Toronto subreddit is the starting point. It has roughly 250 comments at the time of this writing, mostly from others bashing the company. A few other media outlets, including the Daily Dot and Consumerist have reported on it. The reddit post, titled "I want Reddit Toronto to see how bogus Yelp is" goes like this:

My family opened a Mediterranean Restaurant approximately 2 years ago called Ba-Li Laffa. During the first number of weeks, we were approached by a marketing member of Yelp who asked us to pay a fee for preferential display on the Yelp website. Due to the fact that were we a new establishment and bills were through the roof at that point, we politely declined their offer. This is where the issues with Yelp begin to arise.

Yelp claims to have an "advanced review engine" that apparently is knowledgable to sift out all the "fake" reviews and only put the "legitimate" reviews visible to those who are searching the restaurant. In theory this makes sense that those account with the sole review being that of your restaurant are probably fake accounts (or possibly someone that you asked to review it for you). Although this is not how it works, and according to numerous accounts from other restauranteurs that I have met through reddit, it is essentially a blackmail money grab by Yelp.

If you go to the site of our restaurant, http://www.yelp.com/biz/ba-li-laffa-kosher-mediterranean-grill-vaughan, you will see that 5 reviews have been selected, all 2/5 stars. If you look below the 5th review, in a light grey text it says "23 other reviews that are not currently recommended". The majority of those "not recommended" reviews are by users with multiple reviews who have given the restaurant between 4-5/5 stars. In essence, they have taken every good review and made it categorized as a "bad review".

Fortunately, our restaurant is not suffering from a lack of customers because our food and service is great (obviously my opinion), but the number of customers we are losing from internet traffic to Yelp is unfortunate. The problem is that the majority of people making review based decisions either visit Yelp or Urban Spoon (which our restaurant is not on). Maybe I'm giving a little too much credit to Yelp for their popularity, but even if I am losing a minor percentage of my business due to their unfavourable reviews they are giving to our restaurant, it is very frustrating because there is nothing I can do about it.

I have message the Yelp Business support center numerous times with no helpful directions or answers. I think word of mouth from these types of things are really important especially because of how many people use and trust Yelp.

As usual, there is no actual evidence revealed. The Daily Dot shares a response from Yelp (along with a screenshot showing positive reviews it says were "likely fraudulent"):

Yelp told the Daily Dot the team had hidden the positive reviews because they'd found them all to be sent from the same IP address within a short period of time, indicating fraud. "In cases where businesses have a large number of reviews that aren't recommended, it's often because they've solicited positive reviews from friends, family, or favorite customers or tried to game the system by writing fake reviews for themselves. Yelp does not support these practices as they result in biased reviews which aren't useful to consumers," a Yelp spokesperson said.