Yelp is such a slimy company. First they wall off their mobile web reviews to try to force you to download their POS app, they have the whole extortion racket going trying to strongarm restaurants into paying for advertising, and now this. Friendly reminder - if you are on mobile and trying to read a Yelp review and don't want to download their app, simply hold refresh, click "request desktop site" and it will load t…
https://www.yelp-support.com/article/Does-Yelp-extort-small-... I've kind of gotten tired of diving into the whole "yelp extorted my brother's cousin's friend's coworker's business for better ratings" anecdotal story schtick so I'm just going to link the above -- or are you suggesting they're getting away with lying on official communication? If yelp is altering reviews for paying clients, please show the evidence as…
They've probably carefully avoided lying while still being as misleading as possible.
> If yelp is altering reviews for paying clients, please show the evidence
yelp may not alter the reviews themselves, but it does change the sorting of reviews and images for paying customers.
Also the willingness/capability to carry through on the threat used in extortion isn't directly required, just the threat itself. The execution of the threat is only important when you want the consequences of non-compliance broadly known.
> I suspect, at worst, that they either misunderstood the sales pitch or were contacted by a scummy SEO-like company.
Really? Yelp is a business which provides little to no customer support bandwidth. Sales is easiest point of contact for Businesses with questions about reviews. Do you really think none of those sales people might have deliberately mislead businesses about impact of purchasing advertising on reviews? It may or may not have been condoned by Yelp, but it almost certainly happened.
For specific a specific claim that seems to provide evidence that something weird is going on:
> And what is indisputably clear is that Yelp’s claim that 75 percent of the reviews that get posted by Yelp users become recommended reviews is wildly inaccurate in the case of Baraka Café. When Yelp was only displaying 16 reviews and filtering out 30, it was displaying roughly 35% of all the reviews of Baraka Café, and suppressing 65% of them. It recommended less than half the claimed figure of 75%. Most importantly, none of the suppressed views were negative, only positive reviews were suppressed.[1]
[1] https://thetechnoskeptic.com/yelp-extortion-starring-role/