20% seems surprisingly low.
20% of Yelp reviews are fake
51–60 of 110 posts
Re: 20% of Yelp reviews are fake
#52Another problem I've seen with Yelp is reviews that aren't actually for the intended place. My father-in-law owns a few restaurants. One of them has >300 reviews (solid 4 stars), but shares part of its' name with another restaurant with >1500 reviews (3.5 stars, with a heavy downward trend). Most reviews posted for his restaurant are either 4 or 5 stars, with the majority of lower reviews referencing the other restau…
For the record: if you go and flag a review, in addition to the usual "abusive/TOS violation" type of stuff, you can also report that it "doesn't describe a personal consumer experience." It's not super obvious, but that's the easiest way to dispute someone who's not actually reviewing your restaurant.
I tend to use that to flag those jerkface reviews that are basically "I would never go there" rants.
Re: 20% of Yelp reviews are fake
#53I recently posted 2 reviews on Yelp (I'm not very active on it; this was probably my 2nd and 3rd ever). I gave rave reviews for both. One is filtered, one is not. I see a 50% failure rate in filtering, from my extremely small sample size. Oh, and one of them was in NYC (the non-filtered one). The filtered one, well the chef knows who I am, since I said the same thing to him at dinner that I posted in the review.
Unfortunately that behavior pattern is exactly one that abusive users exhibit as well: innocuous review, long delay, glowing review of "target" business.
Re: 20% of Yelp reviews are fake
#54[deleted]
Re: 20% of Yelp reviews are fake
#55Re: 20% of Yelp reviews are fake
#56Re: 20% of Yelp reviews are fake
#57[deleted]
"You would expect it to be in Yelp's interest to demonstrate its reviews are credible, though I haven't seen that. Competition and articles like this should motivate them in that direction. In the meantime, they benefit from charging businesses to allow positive reviews to appear and to suppress negative reviews (if they're doing that, it would explain why they don't focus on credibility)." I think that you haven't b…
And when Yelp does filter reviews, they routinely are accused in forums like this one of running a pay-to-play scheme.
A business owner hears from a Yelp sales guy about the benefits of sponsoring their page (top placement for a good review of their choice) and hears it as a "threat" to hide all those one shot five star reviews they talked their regulars into writing last month.
Re: 20% of Yelp reviews are fake
#5820% LOL! If only it were that low. I used to be a reputation management company, at one time we were responsible for 10% of the reviews in Silicon Valley. There were metro's where we were about 80% of the reviews. When you think that the majority of companies have less than 10 reviews, and most owners can't resist doing a review, and having a friend do a review you are at 20% really fast. When you combine that with o…
To me what this means is you can't trust a positive signal, but you still can trust a negative one. If it's really that bad, then they're clearly not on the ball.
Re: 20% of Yelp reviews are fake
#59Anyone want to speculate on what percentage of Angie's List reviews are fake? On one hand you have to pay to leave a review. On the other hand, Angie's List gets paid if a business registers twenty fake accounts to post fake reviews.
Re: 20% of Yelp reviews are fake
#6020% LOL! If only it were that low. I used to be a reputation management company, at one time we were responsible for 10% of the reviews in Silicon Valley. There were metro's where we were about 80% of the reviews. When you think that the majority of companies have less than 10 reviews, and most owners can't resist doing a review, and having a friend do a review you are at 20% really fast. When you combine that with o…
I wouldn't consider the owner's friend's review to be "fake." As for the owner him/herself, that might feel a bit unethical, but I still wouldn't call it "fake."
> I wouldn't consider the owner's friend's review to be "fake."
I would. If Obama wrote a book and his childhood friend reviewed it on Amazon, I would discount that review. Or at least consider it highly suspect.