the Better Business Bureau has been doing this for years. Welcome to the real business world.
Lone Yelp review dogs business owner
81–90 of 153 posts
Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner
#82This raises several important issues. The first is that most people don't review things. No matter how easy it is the vast majority of the population just won't do it. The simpler you make it the more that will but the simpler it is the less useful it becomes. This has several important implications. - It makes local hard to scale because your audience size is that much smaller that reviews are far less reliable both…
"The simpler you make it the more that will but the simpler it is the less useful it becomes"
Is there any data to support this point. Intuitively it feels that simple system would lead to higher number of reviews and consequently paint a more accurate picture of reality.
Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner
#83Extortion. This is the racket of the 21st Century. Once you got the eyeballs, you call every business in your database and threaten to cut its legs out from under it unless it pays up. Google's running more or less the same racket. It's "soft"...there are no threats, exactly. But imagine if the Chicago Tribune called vendors and threatened to run a miserable review of them if they didn't pay? So why hasn't that happe…
Am I the only one who believes that yelp is prolly telling the truth and that it was just a coincidence? It sounds quite plausible to me that their algorithms work in the way, that are described in the article.
It certainly seems like the majority of people complaining about tend to be mom and pop operations with little or no internet savvy. This tends to foster a paranoid attitude, sort of like when you know nothing about cars and take your car to a new mechanic.
On the other hand, Yelp is walking a thin line with their business model.
Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner
#84It's easy to come down against Yelp, but small businesses have been trying to "game" Yelp in unsophisticated ways for some time.
We work with a lot of small businesses and I've had conversations with a statistically significant number of them who have admitted trying to flood Yelp with reviews they've written themselves, writing reviews under fake named accounts, and providing over-glowing text for reviews to be submitted by friends. They get angry at Yelp for allowing bad reviews to show up and think they can fix it with reviews written in all-caps with text like "Bob and Jane ARE THE NICEST, WARMEST, MOST AMAZING PEOPLE I KNOW and the person who wrote the review above DOESN"T KNOW WHAT THEY'RE TALKING ABOUT." We always advise them not to use these tactics but to instead put a sign up asking their customers to leave reviews on Yelp (since all reviews on the site trend to 4.3, they're probably improving their position with every new review).
To recap:
- So a business has a small amount of reviews online, one negative from someone who has left more than 400 reviews.
- The business asks their loyal customers to leave positive reviews all at the same time.
- Yelp sees abnormal traffic and abnormal acceleration of overly-positive reviews from brand new users (OMG. Best Dog Trainer EVER!! A+++++ Would recommend).
- Yelp's algorithm flags this activity as abnormal since it looks similar to spam/paid/fake reviews and won't alter their algorithm to accommodate an attempt to game their system.
The reality is small businesses do this kind of "gaming" all the time and sometimes it's benign, sometimes it's malicious or fake. I once worked with a client who had left dozens of reviews about themselves and complained that Yelp always took them down which "wasn't fair". Yelp sees way more attempts at gaming reviews than you'd realize and I imagine they've gotten pretty good at it. Like Google's algorithms, Yelp's algorithms may occasionally flag real reviews. Both have an incentive to improve.
The other thing is that if I'm a sales agent at Yelp (responsible for bringing in $8k in revenue this month), I'm going to call on customers who have bad reviews (and thus show up lower in searches) first. This is not because I'm trying to scam anyone. It's because the folks at the bottom are usually the most eager to pay to show up at the top. The guys who already sit in the top 5 spots of an organic search have trouble justifying the expense. If I call on someone who is on the first page of a Yelp search, their first thought isn't going to be "this guy's trying to scam us". Likewise, the companies that buy Google ads aren't the ones who show up first in an organic search either (unless they demonstrate that the ROI justifies it. SMBs aren't typically as sophisticated).
This isn't extortion, it's not a scam, and it's not wrong. It may appear obtuse from the outside, but nothing would harm Yelp more than for these allegations to be true. It would be downright irresponsible of Yelp to try to do things this way from a shareholders' perspective.
TL;DR: SMBs try to game Yelp all the time. Yelp's built algorithms to look for this kind of behavior. This business hit a lot of triggers.
Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner
#85For those that haven't seen it, this is exactly how the Better Business Bureau (BBB) operates as well, here is a 20/20 investigation look at it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yo8kfV9kONw
Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner
#86Customer reviews and ratings can be one hell of a mess, not just for businesses but also for customers. As a customer, they are often useful in narrowing down one's choices, even with a margin of error from cheating or lack of enough data. But, they are still a heck of a lot of work! Ever tried choosing a wardrobe, washing machine or laptop based on reviews? You can spend hours reading wildly different accounts, whic…
Reviews can be pretty useful. If my mom needs a simple modem/wifi/router in her house, I'll just buy her whatever one has the most reviews on Amazon.
If you choose a product with a rating of more than 4 stars averaged over a lot of customer reviews, it's pretty decent data to go by. For routers, there are a handful of good brand names you can safely pick from. Even so, you admit you don't actually read the reviews, just go by the total number.
It's harder when choosing a product like a washing machine which has a lot of options between 3-4 stars in any given price range and no clear winner.
Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner
#87This raises several important issues. The first is that most people don't review things. No matter how easy it is the vast majority of the population just won't do it. The simpler you make it the more that will but the simpler it is the less useful it becomes. This has several important implications. - It makes local hard to scale because your audience size is that much smaller that reviews are far less reliable both…
What Yelp does is a racket, similar to what BBB does. In Yelp's case they are being helped by Google and other search engines. The problem is that when people link to them that's an upvote in Google's eyes. After enough upvotes are gained, provided they don't spam, there's little anybody can do to downvote them. It's not like you can negatively link to them. This, I feel, is one of the main problems with the like and…
As a consumer i'd prefer not getting any likes to getting tons of notlikes on my boring fb status updates...
Besides, an issue with such systems being used to determine merit is this... Which is worse, having a bunch of people who consume the content you created and not give a ditt or people connecting with it and disagreeing and marking a downvote
Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner
#88"they are convinced it filtered at least some of the positive reviews after the Braders refused to buy advertising."
If I was Yelp, I'd try to address this accusation somewhere.
Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yelp seems to have had a lot of bad press for this kind of thing and has had at least one class action suit, alleging extortion, levelled against it: http://yelpscam.com/negative-yelp-press.html
A lawsuit filed against them is not proof of anything. That same suit was thrown out.
That's an awful lot of negative press. Seems quite possible there's something to it (unless there's some sort of conspiracy against Yelp).
Re: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner
#90It's easy to come down against Yelp, but small businesses have been trying to "game" Yelp in unsophisticated ways for some time. We work with a lot of small businesses and I've had conversations with a statistically significant number of them who have admitted trying to flood Yelp with reviews they've written themselves, writing reviews under fake named accounts, and providing over-glowing text for reviews to be subm…
Agreed. If there was one terrible review written a year or two ago by someone with a reviewing history, and then suddenly twenty gushing all caps reviews filled with superlatives and exclamations of personal affection by reviewers with no other review history, all posted within the same week, I'd be upset if yelp didn't filter them out.
If some business tells all of their best customers to post a review on Yelp, a site they had never used before, then they actually are straw reviews and worth nothing - and this business owner admits that. Case closed. Filter working perfectly.
This is not to say that the one bad review characterizes this man's business in any way. He probably just doesn't have a tech-savvy, hip clientele, and the first yelper he ran into may have been a spoiled curmudgeon. What offsets the damage is that since he isn't drawing from that hip clientele, the review is likely not driving away any significant business.
The best response would probably be to put a Yelp sign in some prominent space, which might trigger someone who is familiar with their business to add a few more reviews. If he gives good service, the preponderance will be good. Much better idea than calling for a favor from your affectionate regulars.
There is no right to a good reputation.